In the autumn of 332 BC Alexander the Great invaded Egypt with his mixed army of Macedonians and Greeks and found the Egyptians ready to throw off the oppressive control of the hated Persians. Alexander was welcomed by the Egyptians as a liberator and took the country without a battle. He journeyed to Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert to visit the Oracle of Amon, renowned in the Greek world; it disclosed the information that Alexander was the son of Amon. There may also have been a coronation at the Egyptian capital, Memphis, which, if it occurred, would have placed him firmly in the tradition of the pharaohs; the same purpose may be seen in the later dissemination of the romantic myth that gave him an Egyptian parentage by linking his mother, Olympias, with the last pharaoh, Nectanebo II.

Alexander left Egypt in the spring of 331 BC, dividing the military command between Balacrus, son of Amyntas, and Peucestas, son of Makartatos. The earliest known Greek documentary papyrus, found at Ṣaqqārah in 1973, reveals the sensitivity of the latter to Egyptian religious institutions in a notice that reads: “Order of Peucestas. No-one is to pass. The chamber is that of a priest.” The civil administration was headed by an official with the Persian title of satrap, one Cleomenes of Naukratis. When Alexander died in 323 BC and his generals divided his empire, the position of satrap was claimed by Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian nobleman named Lagus. The senior general Perdiccas, the holder of Alexander’s royal seal and prospective regent for Alexander’s posthumous son, might well have regretted his failure to take Egypt. He gathered an army and marched from Asia Minor to wrest Egypt from Ptolemy in 321 BC; but Ptolemy had Alexander’s corpse, Perdiccas’ army was not wholehearted in support, and the Nile crocodiles made a good meal from the flesh of the invaders.

The Ptolemaic dynasty

Until the day when he openly assumed an independent kingship as Ptolemy I Soter, on Nov. 7, 305 BC, Ptolemy used only the title satrap of Egypt, but the great hieroglyphic Satrap stela, which he had inscribed in 311 BC, indicates a degree of self-confidence that transcends his viceregal role. It reads, “I, Ptolemy the satrap, I restore to Horus, the avenger of his father, the lord of Pe and to Buto, the lady of Pe and Dep, the territory of Patanut, from this day forth for ever, with all its villages, all its towns, all its inhabitants, all its fields.” The inscription emphasizes Ptolemy’s own role in wresting the land from the Persians (though the epithet of Soter, meaning “Saviour,” resulted not from his actions in Egypt but from the gratitude of the people of Rhodes for his having relieved them from a siege in 315 BC) and links him with Khabbash, who had laid claim to the kingship during the last Persian occupation in about 338 BC.

Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy’s descendants until the death of Cleopatra VII on Aug. 12, 30 BC. The kingdom was one of several that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander’s death and struggles of his successors. It was the wealthiest, however, and, for much of the next 300 years, the most powerful politically and culturally, and it was the last to fall directly under Roman dominion. In many respects, the character of the Ptolemaic monarchy in Egypt set a style for other Hellenistic kingdoms; this style emerged from the Greeks’ and Macedonians’ awareness of the need to dominate Egypt, its resources, and its people and at the same time to turn the power of Egypt firmly toward the context of a Mediterranean world that was becoming steadily more Hellenized.

The Ptolemies (305–145 BC)

The first 160 years of the Ptolemaic dynasty are conventionally seen as its most prosperous era. Little is known of the foundations laid in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (304–282 BC), but the increasing amount of documentary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence from the reign of his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC), shows that the kingdom’s administration and economy underwent a thorough reorganization. A remarkable demotic text of the year 258 BC refers to orders for a complete census of the kingdom that was to record the sources of water; the position, quality, and irrigation potential of the land; the state of cultivation; the crops grown; and the extent of priestly and royal landholdings. There were important agricultural innovations in this period. New crops were introduced, and massive irrigation works brought under cultivation a great deal of new land, especially in the Fayyūm, where many of the immigrant Greeks were settled.

The Macedonian-Greek character of the monarchy was vigorously preserved. There is no more emphatic sign of this than the growth and importance of the city of Alexandria. It had been founded, on a date traditionally given as April 7, 331 BC, by Alexander the Great on the site of the insignificant Egyptian village of Rakotis in the northwestern Delta, and it ranked as the most important city in the eastern Mediterranean until the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century AD. The importance of the new Greek city was soon emphasized by contrast to its Egyptian surroundings when the royal capital was transferred, within a few years of Alexander’s death, from Memphis to Alexandria. The Ptolemaic court cultivated extravagant luxury in the Greek style in its magnificent and steadily expanding palace complex, which occupied as much as a third of the city by the early Roman period. Its grandeur was emphasized in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus by the foundation of a quadrennial festival, the Ptolemaieia, which was intended to enjoy a status equal to that of the Olympic Games. The festival was marked by a procession of amazingly elaborate and ingeniously constructed floats, with scenarios illustrating Greek religious cults.

Ptolemy II gave the dynasty another distinctive feature when he married his full sister, Arsinoe II, one of the most powerful and remarkable women of the Hellenistic age. They became, in effect, co-rulers, and both took the epithet Philadelphus (“Brother-Loving” and “Sister-Loving”). The practice of consanguineous marriage was followed by most of their successors and imitated by ordinary Egyptians too, even though it had not been a standard practice in the pharaonic royal houses and had been unknown in the rest of the native Egyptian population. Arsinoe played a prominent role in the formation of royal policy. She was displayed on the coinage and was eventually worshiped, perhaps even before her death, in the distinctively Greek style of ruler cult that developed in this reign.

From the first phase of the wars of Alexander’s successors the Ptolemies had harboured imperial ambitions. Ptolemy I won control of Cyprus and Cyrene and quarreled with his neighbour over control of Palestine. In the course of the 3rd century a powerful Ptolemaic empire developed, which, for much of the period, laid claim to sovereignty in the Levant, in many of the cities of the western and southern coast of Asia Minor, in some of the Aegean islands, and in a handful of towns in Thrace, as well as in Cyprus and Cyrene. Family connections and dynastic alliances, especially between the Ptolemies and the neighbouring Seleucids, played a very important role in these imperialistic ambitions. Such links were far from able to preserve harmony between the royal houses (between 274 and 200 BC five wars were fought with the Seleucids over possession of territory in Syria and the Levant), but they did keep the ruling houses relatively compact, interconnected, and more true to their Macedonian-Greek origins.

When Ptolemy II Philadelphus died in 246 BC, he left a prosperous kingdom to his successor, Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–222 BC). His reign saw a very successful campaign against the Seleucids in Syria, occasioned by the murder of Euergetes’ sister, Berenice, who had been married to the Seleucid Antiochus II. To avenge Berenice, Euergetes marched into Syria, where he won a great victory. He gained popularity at home by recapturing statues of Egyptian gods originally taken by the Persians. The decree promulgated at Canopus in the Delta on March 4, 238 BC, attests both this event and the many great benefactions conferred on Egyptian temples throughout the land. It was during Euergetes’ reign, for instance, that the rebuilding of the great Temple of Horus at Idfū (Apollinopolis Magna) was begun.

Euergetes was succeeded by his son Ptolemy IV Philopator (222–205 BC), whom the Greek historians portray as a weak and corrupt ruler, dominated by a powerful circle of Alexandrian Greek courtiers. The reign was notable for another serious conflict with the Seleucids, which ended in 217 BC in a great Ptolemaic victory at Raphia in southern Palestine. The battle is notable for the fact that large numbers of native Egyptian soldiers fought alongside the Macedonian and Greek contingents. Events surrounding the death of Philopator and the succession of the youthful Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 BC) are obscured by court intrigue. Before Epiphanes had completed his first decade of rule, serious difficulties arose. Native revolts in the south, which had been sporadic in the second half of the 3rd century, became serious and weakened the hold of the monarch on a vital part of the kingdom. These revolts, which produced native claimants to the kingship, are generally attributed to the native Egyptians’ realization, after their contribution to the victory at Raphia, of their potential power. Trouble continued to break out for several more decades. By about 196 a great portion of the Ptolemaic overseas empire had been permanently lost (though there may have been a brief revival in the Aegean islands in about 165–145 BC). To shore up and advertise the strength of the ruling house at home and abroad, the administration adopted a series of grandiloquent honorific titles for its officers. To conciliate Egyptian feelings, a religious synod that met in 196 to crown Epiphanes at Memphis (the first occasion on which a Ptolemy is certainly known to have been crowned at the traditional capital) decreed extensive privileges for the Egyptian temples, as recorded on the Rosetta Stone.

The reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 BC), a man of pious and magnanimous character, was marked by renewed conflict with the Seleucids after the death of his mother, Cleopatra I, in 176 BC. In 170 BC Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and established a protectorate; in 168 BC he returned, accepted coronation at Memphis, and installed a Seleucid governor. But he had failed to reckon with more powerful interests: those of Rome. In the summer of 168 BC a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, arrived at Antiochus’ headquarters near Pelusium in the Delta and staged an awesome display of Roman power. He ordered Antiochus to withdraw from Egypt. Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisers. Laenas drew a circle around the King with his stick and told him to answer before he stepped out of the circle. Only one answer was possible, and by the end of July Antiochus had left Egypt. Philometor’s reign was further troubled by rivalry with his brother, later Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II Physcon. The solution, devised under Roman advice, was to remove Physcon to Cyrene, where he remained until Philometor died in 145 BC; but it is noteworthy that in 155 BC Physcon took the step of bequeathing the kingdom of Cyrene to the Romans in the event of his untimely death.

Dynastic strife and decline (145–30 BC)

Physcon was able to rule in Egypt until 116 BC with his sister Cleopatra II (except for a period in 131–130 BC when she was in revolt) and her daughter Cleopatra III. His reign was marked by generous benefactions to the Egyptian temples, but he was detested as a tyrant by the Greeks, and the historical accounts of the reign emphasize his stormy relations with the Alexandrian populace.

During the last century of Ptolemaic rule, Egypt’s independence was exercised under Rome’s protection and at Rome’s discretion. For much of the period Rome was content to support a dynasty that had no overseas possession except Cyprus after 96 BC (the year in which Cyrene was bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy Apion) and no ambitions threatening Roman interests or security. After a series of brief and unstable reigns, Ptolemy XII Auletes acceded to the throne in 80 BC. He maintained his hold for 30 years, despite the attractions that Egypt’s legendary wealth held for avaricious Roman politicians. In fact, Auletes had to flee Egypt in 58 BC and was restored by Pompey’s friend Gabinius in 55 BC, no doubt after spending so much in bribes that he had to bring back Rabirius Postumus, one of his Roman creditors, to Egypt with him to manage his financial affairs.

In 52 BC, the year before his death, Auletes associated with himself on the throne his daughter Cleopatra VII and his elder son Ptolemy XIII (who died in 47 BC). The reign of Cleopatra was that of a vigorous and exceptionally able queen who was ambitious, among other things, to revive the prestige of the dynasty by cultivating influence with powerful Roman commanders and using their capacity to aggrandize Roman clients and allies. Julius Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt in 48 BC. After learning of Pompey’s murder at the hands of Egyptian courtiers, Caesar stayed long enough to enjoy a sightseeing tour up the Nile in the Queen’s company in the summer of 47 BC. When he left for Rome, Cleopatra was pregnant with a child she claimed was Caesar’s. The child, a son, was named Caesarion (“Little Caesar”). Cleopatra and Caesarion later followed Caesar back to Rome but, after his assassination in 44 BC, they returned hurriedly to Egypt and she tried for a while to play a neutral role in the struggles between the Roman generals and their factions.

Her long liaison with Mark Antony began when she visited him at Tarsus in 41 BC and he returned to Egypt with her. Between 36 and 30 BC the famous romance between the Roman general and the eastern queen was exploited to great effect by Antony’s political rival Octavian. By 34 BC Caesarion was officially co-ruler with Cleopatra, but his rule clearly was an attempt to exploit the popularity of Caesar’s memory. In the autumn Cleopatra and Antony staged an extravagant display in which they made grandiose dispositions of territory in the east to their children, Alexander Helios, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra Selene. Cleopatra and Antony were portrayed to the Roman public as posing for artists in the guise of Dionysus and Isis or whiling away their evenings in rowdy and decadent banquets that kept the citizens of Alexandria awake all night. But this propaganda war was merely the prelude to armed conflict, and the issue was decided in September 31 BC in a naval battle at Actium in western Greece. When the battle was at its height Cleopatra and her squadron withdrew, and Antony eventually followed suit. They fled to Alexandria but could do little more than await the arrival of the victorious Octavian 10 months later. Alexandria was captured and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide—he by falling on his sword, she probably by the bite of an asp—in August of 30 BC. It is reported that when Octavian reached the city he visited and touched the preserved corpse of Alexander the Great, causing a piece of the nose to fall off. He refused to gaze upon the remains of the Ptolemies, saying “I wished to see a king, not corpses.”

Government and conditions under the Ptolemies

The changes brought to Egypt by the Ptolemies were momentous; the land’s resources were harnessed with unparalleled efficiency and the result was that it became the wealthiest of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Land under cultivation was increased, new crops were introduced (especially important was the introduction of naked tetraploid wheat, triticum durum, to replace the traditional husked emmer, triticum dicoccum). The population, estimated at perhaps 3,000,000–4,000,000 in the Late Dynastic Period, may have more than doubled by the early Roman period to a figure of 7,500,000 or 8,000,000, a level not reached again until the late 19th century. Some of the increase was due to immigration; particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries many settlers were attracted from the cities of Asia Minor and the Greek islands, as well as large numbers of Jews from Palestine. The flow may have decreased later in the Ptolemaic period, and it is often suggested, on slender evidence, that there was a serious decline in prosperity in the 1st century BC. If so, there may have been some reversal of this trend under Cleopatra VII.

Administration

The foundation of the prosperity was the governmental system devised to exploit the country’s economic resources. Directly below the monarch were a handful of powerful officials whose competence extended over the entire land: a chief finance minister, a chief accountant, and a chancery of ministers in charge of records, letters, and decrees. A level below them lay the broadening base of a pyramid of subordinate officials with competence in limited areas, which extended down to the chief administrator of each individual village (kōmarchēs). Between the chief ministers and the village officials stood those such as the nome-steward (oikonomos) and stratēgoi, whose competence extended over one of the more than 30 nomes of Egypt, the long-established geographic divisions. In theory this bureaucracy could regulate and control the economic activities of every subject in the land, its smooth operation guaranteed by the multiplicity of officials capable of checking each upon the other. In practice, it is difficult to see a rigid civil-service mentality at work, involving clear demarcation of departments; specific functions might well have been performed by different officials according to local need and the availability of a person competent to take appropriate action.

By the same token, rigid lines of separation between military and civil, legal and administrative matters are difficult to perceive. The same official might perform duties in one or all of these areas, and the law in particular regulated every activity to an extent that the use of the terms legal and judicial tends to hide. The military was inevitably integrated into civilian life because its soldiers were also farmers who enjoyed royal grants of land, either as Greek cleruchs (holders of allotments) with higher status and generous grants, or as native Egypt machimoi with small plots. Interlocking judiciary institutions, in the form of Greek and Egyptian courts (chrēmatistai and laokritai), provided the means for Greeks and Egyptians to regulate their legal relationships according to the language in which they conducted their business. The bureaucratic power was heavily weighted in favour of the Greek speakers, the dominant elite. Egyptians were nevertheless able to obtain official posts in the bureaucracy, gradually infiltrating to the highest levels, but in order to do so they had to Hellenize.

Economy

The basis of Egypt’s legendary wealth was the highly productive land, which technically remained in royal ownership. A considerable portion was kept under the control of temples, and the remainder was leased out on a theoretically revocable basis to tenant-farmers. A portion also was available to be granted as gifts to leading courtiers; one of these was Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had an estate of 10,000 arourae (about 6,500 acres) at Philadelphia in the Fayyūm. Tenants and beneficiaries were able to behave very much as if these leases and grants were private property. The revenues in cash and kind were enormous, and royal control extended to the manufacture and marketing of almost all important products, including papyrus, oil, linen, and beer. An extraordinarily detailed set of revenue laws, promulgated under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, laid down rules for the way in which officials were to monitor the production of such commodities. In fact, the Ptolemaic economy was very much a mixture of direct royal ownership and exploitation by private enterprise under regulated conditions.

One fundamental and far-reaching Ptolemaic innovation was the systematic monetarization of the economy. This too the monarchy controlled from top to bottom by operating a closed monetary system, which permitted only the royal coinage to circulate within Egypt. A sophisticated banking system underpinned this practice, operating again with a mixture of direct royal control and private enterprise and handling both private financial transactions and those that directed money into and out of the royal coffers. One important concomitant of this change was an enormous increase in the volume of trade, both within Egypt and abroad, which eventually reached its climax under the peaceful conditions of Roman rule. Here the position and role of Alexandria as the major port and trading entrepôt was crucial: the city handled a great volume of Egypt’s domestic produce, as well as the import and export of luxury goods to and from the East and the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. It developed its own importance as an artistic centre, the products of which found ready markets throughout the Mediterranean. Alexandrian glassware and jewelry were particularly fine; Greek-style sculpture of the late Ptolemaic period shows especial excellence; and it is likely that the city was also the major production centre for high-quality mosaic work.

Religion

The Ptolemies were powerful supporters of the native Egyptian religious foundations, the economic and political power of which was, however, carefully controlled. A great deal of the building and restoration work in many of the most important Egyptian temples is Ptolemaic, particularly from the period of about 150–50 BC, and the monarchs appear on temple reliefs in the traditional forms of the Egyptian kings. The native traditions persisted in village temples and local cults, many having particular associations with species of sacred animals or birds. At the same time, the Greeks created their own identifications of Egyptian deities, identifying Amon with Zeus, Horus with Apollo, Ptah with Hephaestus, and so on. They also gave some deities, such as Isis, a more universal significance that ultimately resulted in the spread of her mystery cult throughout the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Greeks is most obvious in two phenomena. One is the formalized royal cult of Alexander and the Ptolemies, which evidently served both a political and a religious purpose. The other is the creation of the cult of Sarapis, which at first was confined to Alexandria but soon became universal. The god was represented as a Hellenized deity and the form of cult is Greek; but its essence is the old Egyptian notion that the sacred Apis bull merged its divinity in some way with the god Osiris when it died.

Culture

The continuing vitality of the native Egyptian artistic tradition is clearly and abundantly expressed in the temple architecture and the sculpture of the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptian language continued in use in its hieroglyphic and demotic forms until late in the Roman period, and it survived through the Byzantine period and beyond in the form of Coptic. The Egyptian literary tradition flourished vigorously in the Ptolemaic period and produced a large number of works in demotic. The genre most commonly represented is the romantic tale, exemplified by several story cycles, which are typically set in the native, Pharaonic milieu and involve the gods, royal figures, magic, romance, and the trials and combats of heroes. Another important category is the Instruction Text, the best known of the period being that of Ankhsheshonq, which consists of a list of moralizing maxims, composed, as the story goes, when Ankhsheshonq was imprisoned for having failed to inform the pharaoh of an assassination plot. Another example, known as Papyrus Insinger, is a more narrowly moralizing text. But the arrival of a Greek-speaking elite had an enormous impact on cultural patterns. The Egyptian story cycles were probably affected by Greek influence; literary and technical works were translated into Greek; and under royal patronage an Egyptian priest named Manetho of Sebennytos wrote an account of the kings of Egypt, in Greek. Most striking is the diffusion of the works of the poets and playwrights of classical Greece among the literate Greeks in the towns and villages of the Nile Valley.

Thus there are clear signs of the existence of two interacting but distinct cultural traditions in Ptolemaic Egypt. This was certainly reflected in a broader social context. The written sources offer little direct evidence of racial discrimination by Greeks against Egyptians, but Greek and Egyptian consciousness of the Greeks’ social and economic superiority comes through strongly from time to time; intermarriage was one means, though not the only one, by which Egyptians could better their status and Hellenize. Many native Egyptians learned to speak Greek, some to write it as well; some even went so far as to adopt Greek names in an attempt to assimilate themselves to the elite group.

Alexandria occupied a unique place in the history of literature, ideas, scholarship, and science for almost a millennium after the death of its founder. Under the royal patronage of the Ptolemies, and in an environment almost oblivious to its Egyptian surroundings, Greek culture was preserved and developed. Early in the Ptolemaic period, probably in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, the Museum (“Shrine of the Muses”) was established within the palace complex. Strabo, who saw it early in the Roman period, described it as having a covered walk, an arcade with recesses and seats, and a large house containing the dining hall of the members of the Museum, who lived a communal existence. The Great Library of Alexandria (together with its offshoot in the Sarapeum) was indispensable to the functioning of the scholarly community in the Museum. Books were collected voraciously under the Ptolemies, and at its height the library’s collection probably numbered close to 500,000 papyrus rolls, most of them containing more than one work.

The major poets of the Hellenistic period, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes, all took up residence and wrote there. Scholarship flourished, preserving and ordering the manuscript traditions of much of the classical literature from Homer onward. Librarian-scholars such as Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus made critical editions and wrote commentaries and works on grammar. Also notable was the cultural influence of Alexandria’s Jewish community, which is inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch was first translated into Greek at Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period. One by-product of this kind of activity was that Alexandria became the centre of the book trade, and the works of the classical authors were copied there and diffused among a literate Greek readership scattered in the towns and villages of the Nile Valley.

The Alexandrian achievement in scientific fields was also enormous. Great advances were made in pure mathematics, mechanics, physics, geography, and medicine. Euclid worked in Alexandria in about 300 BC and achieved the systematization of the whole existing corpus of mathematical knowledge and the development of the method of proof by deduction from axioms. Archimedes was there in the 3rd century BC and is said to have invented the Archimedean screw when he was in Egypt; Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference and was the first to attempt a map of the world based on a system of lines of latitude and longitude; and the school of medicine founded in the Ptolemaic period retained its leading reputation into the Byzantine era. Late in the Ptolemaic period Alexandria began to develop as a great centre of Greek philosophical studies as well. In fact, there was no field of literary, intellectual, or scientific activity to which Ptolemaic Alexandria failed to make an important contribution.

Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 BC–AD 642)

Egypt as a province of Rome

“I added Egypt to the Empire of the Roman people.” With these words the emperor Augustus (as Octavian was known from 27 BC) summarized the subjection of Cleopatra’s kingdom in the great inscription that records his achievements. The province was to be governed by a viceroy, a prefect with the status of a Roman knight (eques) who was directly responsible to the emperor. The first viceroy was the Roman poet and soldier Cornelius Gallus, who boasted too vaingloriously of his military achievements in the province and paid for it first with his position and then with his life. Roman senators were not allowed to enter Egypt without the emperor’s permission, because this wealthiest of provinces could be held militarily by a very small force; and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of grain supplies, vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal security was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions (later reduced to two), each about 6,000 strong, and several cohorts of auxiliaries. In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield, attempting expansion to the east and to the south. An expedition to Arabia by the prefect Aelius Gallus in about 26–25 BC was undermined by the treachery of the Nabataean Syllaeus, who led the Roman fleet astray in uncharted waters. Arabia was to remain an independent though friendly client of Rome until AD 106, when the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117) annexed it, making it possible to reopen Ptolemy II’s canal from the Nile to the head of the Gulf of Suez. To the south the Meroitic people beyond the First Cataract had taken advantage of Gallus’ preoccupation with Arabia and mounted an attack on the Thebaid. The next Roman prefect, Petronius, led two expeditions into the Meroitic kingdom (c. 24–22 BC), captured several towns, forced the submission of the formidable queen, who was characterized by Roman writers as “the one-eyed Queen Candace,” and left a Roman garrison at Primis (Qaṣr Ibrīm). But thoughts of maintaining a permanent presence in Lower Nubia were soon abandoned, and within a year or two the limits of Roman occupation had been set at Hiera Sykaminos, some 50 miles south of the First Cataract. The mixed character of the region is indicated, however, by the continuing popularity of the goddess Isis among the people of Meroe and by the Roman emperor Augustus’ foundation of a temple at Kalabsha dedicated to the local god Mandulis.

Egypt achieved its greatest prosperity under the shadow of the Roman peace which, in effect, depoliticized it. Roman emperors or members of their families visited Egypt—Tiberius’ nephew and adopted son, Germanicus; Vespasian and his elder son, Titus; Hadrian; Septimius Severus; Diocletian—to see the famous sights, receive the acclamations of the Alexandrian populace, attempt to ensure the loyalty of the volatile subjects, or initiate administrative reform. Occasionally its potential as a power base was realized. Vespasian, the most successful of the imperial aspirants in the “Year of the Four Emperors,” was first proclaimed at Alexandria on July 1, AD 69, in a maneuver contrived by the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander. Others were less successful. Avidius Cassius, the son of a former prefect of Egypt, revolted against Marcus Aurelius in AD 175, stimulated by false rumours of Marcus’ death, but his attempted usurpation lasted only three months. For several months in AD 297/298 Egypt was under the dominion of a mysterious usurper named Lucius Domitius Domitianus. The emperor Diocletian was present at the final capitulation of Alexandria after an eight-month siege and swore to take revenge by slaughtering the populace until the river of blood reached his horse’s knees; the threat was mitigated when his mount stumbled as he rode into the city. In gratitude, the citizens of Alexandria erected a statue of the horse.

The only extended period during the turbulent 3rd century AD in which Egypt was lost to the central imperial authority was 270–272, when it fell into the hands of the ruling dynasty of the Syrian city of Palmyra. Fortunately for Rome, the military strength of Palmyra proved to be the major obstacle to the overrunning of the Eastern Empire by the powerful Sāsānian monarchy of Persia.

Internal threats to security were not uncommon but normally were dissipated without major damage to imperial control. These included rioting between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in the reign of Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus; ruled AD 37–41); a serious Jewish revolt under Trajan (ruled AD 98–117); a revolt in the Delta in AD 172 that was quelled by Avidius Cassius; and a revolt centred on the town of Coptos (Qifṭ) in AD 293/294 that was put down by Galerius, Diocletian’s imperial colleague.

Administration and economy under Rome

The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue. The duties of the prefect of Egypt combined responsibility for military security through command of the legions and cohorts, for the organization of finance and taxation, and for the administration of justice. This involved a vast mass of detailed paperwork: one document of AD 211 notes that in a period of three days 1,804 petitions were handed into the prefect’s office. But the prefect was assisted by a hierarchy of subordinate equestrian officials with expertise in particular areas. There were three or four epistratēgoi in charge of regional subdivisions; special officers were in charge of the emperors’ private account, the administration of justice, religious institutions, and so on. Subordinate to them were the local officials in the nomes (stratēgoi and royal scribes) and finally the authorities in the towns and villages.

It was in these growing towns that the Romans made the most far-reaching changes in administration. They introduced colleges of magistrates and officials who were to be responsible for running the internal affairs of their own communities on a theoretically autonomous basis and, at the same time, were to guarantee the collection and payment of tax quotas to the central government. This was backed up by the development of a range of “liturgies,” compulsory public services that were imposed on individuals according to rank and property to ensure the financing and upkeep of local facilities. These institutions were the Egyptian counterpart of the councils and magistrates that oversaw the Greek cities in the eastern Roman provinces. They had been ubiquitous in other Hellenistic kingdoms, but in Ptolemaic Egypt they had existed only in the so-called Greek cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais in Upper Egypt, Naukratis, and later Antinoöpolis, founded by Hadrian in AD 130). Alexandria lost the right to have a council, probably in the Ptolemaic period. When it recovered its right in AD 200 the privilege was diluted by being extended to the nome capitals (mētropoleis) as well. This extension of privilege represented an attempt to shift more of the burden and expense of administration onto the local propertied classes, but it was eventually to prove too heavy. The consequences were the impoverishment of many of the councillors and their families and serious problems in administration that led to an increasing degree of central government interference and, eventually, more direct control.

The economic resources that this administration existed to exploit had not changed since the Ptolemaic period, but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation system was a hallmark of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and a bewildering variety of small taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was collected by appointed officials. A massive amount of Egypt’s grain was shipped downriver both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export to Rome. Despite frequent complaints of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers, it is not obvious that official tax rates were very high. In fact the Roman government had actively encouraged the privatization of land and the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and low tax rates favoured private owners and entrepreneurs. The poorer people gained their livelihood as tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private landlords, and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to remain at a fairly high level.

Overall, the degree of monetarization and complexity in the economy, even at the village level, was intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a large scale and, in the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial activity developed in close conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural base. The volume of trade, both internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. But by the end of the 3rd century AD, major problems were evident. A series of debasements of the imperial currency had undermined confidence in the coinage, and even the government itself was contributing to this by demanding more and more irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main consumers, the army personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and inefficient; the evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine.

Society, religion, and culture

One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency to classification and social control of the populace. Thus, despite many years of intermarriage between Greeks and Egyptians, lists drawn up in AD 4/5 established the right of certain families to class themselves as Greek by descent and to claim privileges attaching to their status as members of an urban aristocracy, known as the gymnasial class. Members of this group were entitled to lower rates of poll tax, subsidized or free distributions of food, and maintenance at the public expense when they grew old. If they or their descendants were upwardly mobile, they might gain Alexandrian citizenship, Roman citizenship, or even equestrian status, with correspondingly greater prestige and privileges. The preservation of such distinctions was implicit in the spread of Roman law and was reinforced by elaborate codes of social and fiscal regulations such as the “Rule-Book of the Emperors’ Special Account.” The “Rule-Book” prescribed conditions under which people of different status might marry, for instance, or bequeath property and fixed fines, confiscations, and other penalties for transgression. When an edict of the emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on practically all of the subjects of the empire in AD 212, the distinction between citizens and noncitizens became meaningless; but it was gradually replaced by an equally important distinction between honestiores and humiliores (meaning, roughly, upper and lower classes), groups that, among other distinctions, were subjected to different penalities in law.

Naturally, it was the Greek-speaking elite that continued to dictate the visibly dominant cultural pattern, though Egyptian culture was not moribund or insignificant; one proof of its continued survival can be seen in its reemergent importance in the context of Coptic Christianity in the Byzantine period. An important reminder of the mixing of the traditions comes from a family of Panopolis in the 4th century, whose members included both teachers of Greek oratory and priests in Egyptian cult. The towns and villages of the Nile Valley have preserved thousands of papyri that show what the literate Greeks were reading: the poems of Homer and the lyric poets, works of the classical Greek tragedians, and comedies of Menander, for example. The pervasiveness of the Greek literary tradition is strikingly demonstrated by evidence left by an obscure and anonymous clerk at the Fayyūm village of Karanis in the 2nd century AD. In copying out a long list of taxpayers, the clerk translated an Egyptian name in the list by an extremely rare Greek word that he could only have known from having read the Alexandrian Hellenistic poet Callimachus; he must have understood the etymology of the Egyptian name as well.

Alexandria continued to develop as a spectacularly beautiful city and to foster Greek culture and intellectual pursuits, though the great days of Ptolemaic court patronage of literary figures had passed. But the flourishing interest in philosophy, particularly Platonic, had important effects. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 1st century, Philo of Alexandria, brought a training in Greek philosophy to bear on his commentaries on the Old Testament. This anticipates by a hundred years the period after the virtual annihilation of the great Jewish community of Alexandria in the revolt of AD 115–117, when the city was the intellectual crucible in which Christianity developed a theology that took it away from the influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition and toward that of Greek philosophical ideas. There the foundations were laid for the teaching of the heads of the Christian catechetical school, such as Clement of Alexandria. And in the 3rd century there was the vital textual and theological work of Origen, the greatest of the Christian Neoplatonists, without which there would hardly have been a coherent New Testament tradition at all.

Outside the Greek ambience of Alexandria, traditional Egyptian religious institutions continued to flourish in the towns and villages; but the temples were reduced to financial dependence on a state subvention (syntaxis) and they became subject to stringent control by secular bureaucrats. Nevertheless, like the Ptolemies before them, Roman emperors appear in the traditional form as Egyptian kings on temple reliefs until the middle of the 3rd century; and five professional hieroglyph cutters were still employed at the town of Oxyrhynchus in the 2nd century. The animal cults continued to flourish, despite Augustus’ famous sneer that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle. As late as the reign of Diocletian (AD 285–305) religious stelae preserved the fiction that in the cults of sacred bulls (best known at Memphis and at Hermonthis), the successor of a dead bull was “installed” by the monarch. Differences between cults of the Greek type and the native Egyptian cults were still very marked, in the temple architecture as in the status of the priests. Priests of Egyptian cult formed, in effect, a caste distinguished by their special clothing, whereas priestly offices in Greek cult were much more like magistracies and tended to be held by local magnates. Cult of Roman emperors, living and dead, became universal after 30 BC, but its impact is most clearly to be seen in the foundations of Caesarea (Temples of Caesar) and in religious institutions of Greek type, where divine emperors were associated with the resident deities.

One development that did have an important effect on this pagan religious amalgam, though it was not decisive until the 4th century, was the arrival of Christianity. The tradition of the foundation of the church of Alexandria by St. Mark cannot be substantiated, but a fragment of a text of the Gospel According to John provides concrete evidence of Christianity in the Nile Valley in the second quarter of the 2nd century AD. Inasmuch as Christianity remained illegal and subject to persecution until the early 4th century, Christians were reluctant to advertise themselves as such, and it is therefore difficult to know how numerous they were, especially because later pro-Christian sources may often be suspected of exaggerating the zeal and the numbers of the early Christian martyrs. But several papyri survive of the libelli submitted in the first official state-sponsored persecution of Christians, under the emperor Decius (ruled 249–251): these were certificates in which people swore that they had performed sacrifices to pagan gods in order to prove that they were not Christians. By the 290s, a decade or so before the great persecution of Diocletian, a list of buildings in the sizeable town of Oxyrhynchus, some 125 miles south of the apex of the delta, included two Christian churches, probably of the house-chapel type.

Egypt’s role in the Byzantine Empire

Diocletian was the last reigning Roman emperor to visit Egypt, in AD 302. Within about 10 years of his visit, the persecution of Christians ceased. The end of persecution had such far-reaching effects that from this point on it is necessary to think of the history of Egypt in a very different framework. No single point can be identified as the watershed between the Roman and Byzantine periods, as the divide between the peace, culture, and prosperity of the Principate and the darker age of the Dominate, supposedly characterized by a more oppressive state machinery in the throes of decline and fall. The crucial changes occurred in the last decade of the 3rd century and the first three decades of the 4th. With the end of persecution of Christians came the restoration of the property of the church. In 313 a new system of calculating and collecting taxes was introduced, with 15-year tax cycles, called indictions, inaugurated retrospectively from the year 312. Many other important administrative changes had already taken place. In 296 the separation of the Egyptian coinage from that of the rest of the empire had come to an end when the Alexandrian mint stopped producing its tetradrachmas, which had been the basis of the closed currency system.

One other event that had an enormous effect on the political history of Egypt was the founding of Constantinople on May 11, 330. First, Constantinople was established as an imperial capital and an eastern counterpart to Rome itself, thus undermining Alexandria’s traditional position as the first city of the Greek-speaking East. Second, it diverted the resources of Egypt away from Rome and the West. Henceforth, part of the surplus of the Egyptian grain supply, which was put at 8,000,000 artabs (about 300,000,000 litres) of wheat in an edict of the emperor Justinian of about 537 or 538, went to feed the growing population of Constantinople, and this created an important political and economic link. The cumulative effect of these changes was to knit Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the empire and to give it, once again, a central role in the political history of the Mediterranean world.

The key to understanding the importance of Egypt in this period lies in seeing how the Christian Church came rapidly to dominate secular as well as religious institutions and to acquire a powerful interest and role in every political issue. The corollary of this was that the head of the Egyptian Church, the patriarch of Alexandria, became the most influential figure within Egypt, as well as the person who could give the Egyptian clergy a powerful voice in the councils of the Eastern Church. During the course of the 4th century, Egypt was divided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller units but the patriarchy was not, and its power thus far outweighed that of any local administrative official. Only the governors of groups of provinces (vicarii of dioceses) were equivalent, the praetorian prefects and emperors superior; and when a patriarch of Alexandria was given civil authority as well, as happened in the case of Cyrus, the last patriarch under Byzantine rule, the combination was very powerful indeed.

The turbulent history of Egypt in the Byzantine period can largely be understood in terms of the struggles of the successive (or, after AD 570, coexisting) patriarchs of Alexandria to maintain their position both within their patriarchy and outside it in relation to Constantinople. What linked Egypt and the rest of the Eastern Empire was the way in which the imperial authorities, when strong (as, for instance, in the reign of Justinian), tried to control the Egyptian Church from Constantinople, while at the same time assuring the capital’s food supply and, as often as not, waging wars to keep their empire intact. Conversely, when weak they failed to control the church. For the patriarchs of Alexandria, it proved impossible to secure the approval of the imperial authorities in Constantinople and at the same time maintain the support of their power base in Egypt. The two made quite different demands, and the ultimate result was a social, political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and between Hellenism and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in Coptic Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 established the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures, inseparably united. The council’s decision in effect sent the Egyptian Coptic (now Coptic Orthodox) Church off on its own path of Monophysitism, which centred around a firm insistence on the singularity of the nature of Christ.

Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the threats posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south (until their conversion to Christianity in the mid-6th century), emperors of Byzantium still could be threatened by the strength of Egypt if it were properly harnessed. The last striking example is the case of the emperor Phocas, a tyrant who was brought down in 609 or 610. Nicetas, the general of the future emperor Heraclius, made for Alexandria from Cyrene, intending to use Egypt as his power base and cut off Constantinople’s grain supply. By the spring of 610 Nicetas’ struggle with Bonosus, the general of Phocas, was won, and the fall of the tyrant duly followed.

The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile Delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in 619 and continued until 628, when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.

In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muḥammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in AD 632 of a holy Islāmic war against Byzantium. Ten years later, by Sept. 29, 642, the Arab general ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, Cyrus, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islām.

The Islāmic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern Delta, then the Fayyūm was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis (now a suburb of Cairo) in July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian defenders. The storming and capture of Trajan’s old fortess at Babylon (on the site of the present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641, was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on Nov. 8, 641, with provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry Egypt’s wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces had left Egypt in ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ had taken Alexandria in the name of the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islāmic caliphate was more strikingly different than anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier.

Byzantine government of Egypt

The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more oppressive state control. Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established (the praeses and the dux). By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life. Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially as a result of the opportunity to buy state-owned land that had been sold into private ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture.

The advance of Christianity

The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in the Coptic Church, which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language—basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity developed its own distinctive art too, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology. These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by AD 391, the year in which the practice of pagan religion was officially made illegal, it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its pagan precedents slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th century a pagan literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked pagan temples and stole statues and magical texts. Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. Both the Gnostics, who believed in redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, for example, clearly thought of themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was discovered at Najʾ Ḥammādī in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as well as mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society pagan magical practices remained ubiquitous and were simply converted into a Christian context.

By the middle of the 5th century Egypt’s landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the magnificent Church of St. Menas (Abū Mīna), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries. The latter were Egypt’s distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were particularly important as strongholds of native loyalty to the Monophysite Church. The origins of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals to congregate about the person of a celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells, adding a church and a refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries, called Pachomian after Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism, were planned from the start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier. But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for worship.

The economic and social power of the Christian Church in the Nile Valley and Delta is the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated propaganda of Islām might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian Church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several centuries more.

From the Islāmic conquest to 1250Medieval Egyptian history opens and closes with foreign conquests of EgyptHistory

This section presents the history of Egypt from the Islamic conquests of the 7th century AD until the present day. For a discussion of Egypt’s earlier history, see Egypt, ancient.

From the Islamic conquest to 1250

The period of Egyptian history between the advent of Islam and Egypt’s entrance into the modern period opens and closes with foreign conquests: the Arab invasion led by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 639 AD 639–642 and the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 mark the beginning and end of an the era. Within the context of Egyptian internal history alone, this era was one in which Egypt cast off the heritage of the past to embrace a new language and a new religion—in other words, a new culture. While it is true that the past was by no means immediately and completely abandoned and that many aspects of Egyptian life, especially rural life, continued virtually unchanged, it is nevertheless clear that the civilization of Islāmic Islamic Egypt diverged sharply from that of the previous Greco-Roman period and was transformed under the impact of Western occupation. The subsequent history of medieval Egypt is therefore largely a study of the processes by which Egyptian Islāmic Islamic civilization evolved, particularly the processes of Arabization and IslāmizationIslamization. But to confine Egyptian history to internal developments is to distort it, for during the that entire medieval period Egypt was a part of a great world empire; and within this broader context, Egypt’s history is a record of its long struggle to dominate an empire—a struggle that is not without its parallels, of course, in both ancient and modern times.

Period of Arab and Turkish governors (639–868)

The sending of a military expedition to Egypt from the caliphal capital in Medina came in a second phase of the first Arab conquests. Theretofore the conquests had been directed against lands on the northern borders of Arabia and were in the nature of raids for plunder; they had grown in scale and momentum as the Byzantines and Persians put Byzantine Empire and Persian Sāsānian dynasty—the two dominant political entities of the time—put up organized resistance. By 635 the Arabs had realized that in order to meet this resistance effectively they must begin the systematic occupation of enemy territory, especially Syria, where the Byzantine army was determined to halt the Arab forays.

The Arab conquest

The Arabs defeated the Byzantines and occupied the key cities of Syria and Palestine, and they vanquished the Persian army on the eastern front in Mesopotamia and Iraq. The next obvious step was to secure Syria against a possible attack launched from the Byzantine province of Egypt. Beyond this strategic consideration, Arab historians call attention to the fact that ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, the Arab general who later conquered Egypt, had visited Alexandria as a youth and had himself witnessed Egypt’s enormous wealth. In spite of the obvious economic gain to be had from conquering Egypt, the caliph ʿUmar I, according to some sources, showed reluctance to detach ʿAmr’s expedition from the Syrian army and even tried to recall the mission once it had embarked; but ʿAmr, with or without the Caliph’s caliph’s permission, undertook the invasion in 639 with a small army of some 4,000 men (later reinforced). With what seems astonishing speed, the Byzantine forces were routed and had withdrawn from Egypt by 642. An attempt by a Byzantine fleet and army to reconquer Alexandria in 645 was quickly defeated by the Arabs.

Various explanations have been given for the speed with which the conquest was achieved, most of which stress the weakness of Byzantine resistance rather than Arab strength. Certainly the division of the Byzantine government and army into autonomous provincial units militated against the possibility of a concerted and coordinated response. Although there is only dubious evidence for the claim that the Copts welcomed the Arab invasion in the belief that Muslim religious tolerance would be preferable to Byzantine enforced orthodoxy and repression, Coptic support for their Byzantine oppressors was probably unenthusiastic at best. (See Coptic Orthodox Church.)

Early Arab rule

In Egypt—as in Syria, Iraq, and Iran—the Arab conquerors did little in the beginning to disturb the status quo; as a small religious and ethnic minority, they thus hoped to make the occupation permanent. Treaties concluded between ʿAmr and the muqawqis (presumably a title referring to Cyrus, archbishop of Alexandria) granted protection to the native population in exchange for the payment of tribute. There was no attempt to force, or even to persuade, the Egyptians to convert to IslāmIslam; the Arabs even pledged to preserve the Christian churches. The Byzantine system of taxation, combining a tax on land with a poll tax, was maintained, though it was streamlined and centralized for the sake of efficiency. The tax was administered by Copts, who staffed the tax bureau at all but the highest levels.

To the mass of inhabitants, the conquest must have made little practical difference, because the Muslim rulersleft them alone, in the beginning at least, left them alone as long as they paid their taxes; if anything, their lot may have been slightly easier, because Byzantine religious persecution had ended. (See Melchite, monophysite, Council of Chalcedon.) Moreover, the Arabs deliberately isolated themselves from the native population, according to ʿUmar’s decree that no Arab could own land outside the Arabian Peninsula; this policy aimed at preventing the Arab tribal armies from dispersing and at ensuring a steady revenue from agriculture, on the assumption that the former landowners would make better farmers than would the Arab nomads.

As was their policy elsewhere, the conquerors refrained from using an established city such as Alexandria as their capital; instead, they founded a new garrison town (Arabic: miṣr), laid out in tribal quarters. As the site for this town they chose the strategic apex of the triangle formed by the Nile Delta—at delta—at that time occupied by the Byzantine fortified township of Babylon. They named the town Al-Fusṭāṭ, which is probably an Arabized form of the Greek term for “encampment” and gives a good indication of the nature of the earliest settlement. Like garrison towns founded by the Arabs in Iraq—Basra and Kūfah—Fusṭāṭ Iraq—Al-Baṣrah and Al-Kūfah—Al-Fusṭāṭ became the main agency of Arabization in Egypt, inasmuch as it was the only town with an Arab majority and therefore required an extensive knowledge of Arabic from the native inhabitants.

The process of Arabization, however, was slow and gradual. Arabic did not displace Greek as the official language of state until 706, and there is evidence that Coptic continued to be used as a spoken language in Al-Fusṭāṭ. Given the lack of pressure from the conquerors, the spread of their religion must have been even slower than that of their language. A mosque was built in Al-Fusṭāṭ bearing the name of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, and each quarter of the town had its own smaller mosque. ʿAmr’s mosque served not only as the religious centre of the town but also as the seat of certain administrative and judicial activitiesas well.

Although Alexandria was maintained as a port city, Al-Fusṭāṭ, being built on the Nile bank, was itself an important port and remained so until the 14th century. ʿAmr enhanced the port’s commercial significance by clearing and reopening Trajan’s Canal, so that shipments of grain destined for Arabia could be sent from Al-Fusṭāṭ to the Red Sea by ship rather than by caravan.

Egypt under the caliphate

For more than 200 years—that is, throughout the Umayyad caliphate and well into the ʿAbbāsid—Egypt was ruled by governors appointed by the caliphs. As a province in an empire, Egypt’s status was much the same as it had been for centuries under foreign rulers whose main interest was to supply the central government with Egyptian taxes and grain. In spite of evidence that the Arab governors tried in general to collect the taxes equitably, taking into account the capacities of individual landowners to pay and the annual variations in agricultural yield, resistance to paying the taxes increased in the 8th century and sometimes erupted into rebellion in times of economic distress. Periodically, religious unrest was manifested in the form of political insurrections, especially in those exceptional times when a governor openly discriminated against the Copts by forcing them to wear distinctive clothing or, worse, by destroying their icons. Still, the official policy, especially in Umayyad times, was tolerance, partly for fiscal reasons. In order to maintain the higher tax revenues collected from non-Muslims, the Arab governors discouraged conversion to Islām Islam and even required those who did convert to continue paying the non-Muslim tax. New Christian churches were sometimes built, and the government took an interest in the selection of patriarchs.

More than just a source of grain and taxes, Egypt also became a base for Arab-Muslim expansion , by both land and sea. The former Byzantine shipyards in Alexandria provided the nucleus of the an Egyptian navy, which between 649 and 669 joined in expeditions with the Syrian navy against Muslim fleets from Syria against the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, and Sicily and defeated the Byzantine navy in a major battle at Phoenix (present-day Finike, Tur.) in 655. By land, the Arab armies advanced both to the south and to the west. As early as 651–652 the governor of Egypt invaded Nubia and imposed a treaty that required the Nubians to pay an annual tribute and to permit the unmolested practice of Islām Islam in the province. Raids against North Africa by Arab armies based in Egypt began in 647; by 670 the Arabs had succeeded in establishing a garrison city in Ifrīqīyah Ifrīqiyyah (now Tunisia), called alKairouan (Al-Qayrawān(Kairouan), which thenceforth displaced Egypt as the base for further expansion.

While some Arabs were passing through Egypt on their way to campaign in North Africa, others were being sent to the Nile Valley valley on a permanent basis. In addition to tribal contingents that at times escorted newly appointed governors to Egypt (some of which settled in towns), tribesmen were sometimes imported and settled in an effort to increase the Arab-Muslim concentration in the vicinity of Al-Fusṭāṭ. The settlement of large numbers of anarchic tribesmen in Egypt, with tribal ties and allegiances elsewhere in the empire, meant that Egypt often became embroiled in political difficulties with the central government. Civil strife centring around on the assassination of the caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (656) began in Egypt, where the tribesmen resented the favouritism shown by the caliph to members of his own family. Uprisings led by the dissident Khārijite sect (the Seceders) were frequent in the mid-8th century. In the 9th century the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmun (reigned 813–833) himself led an army from Iraq to put down a rebellion raised both by tribesmen and by Copts; repression of the Copts accompanying their defeat in 829–830 is usually cited as an important factor in accelerating conversion to IslāmIslam.

The difficulty inherent in ruling Egypt from Baghdad, which was itself undergoing stress and turbulence, is evident from the rapid turnover in governors assigned to Egypt; al-Maʾmūn’s father, the ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn aral-Rashīd (ruled 786–809), for example, appointed 24 governors in a reign of 23 years. Possibly as a means of both removing the governorship from the level of tribal strife and paying the central government’s Turkish troops, the caliphs began assigning Egypt to Turks rather than to Arabs. But this policy resulted in no tangible improvement in the administration of Egyptian affairs until 868, when the reign of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn inaugurated a new phase of medieval Egyptian history.

The Ṭūlūnid dynasty (868–905)Though short-lived, the Ṭūlūnid dynasty succeeded in restoring a measure of Egypt’s ancient glory. For the first time since the pharaohs, Egypt became virtually autonomous and the bulk of its revenues remained within its borders. What is more, Egypt became the centre of a small empire when Ibn Ṭūlūn conquered Syria in 878–879. These developments were paralleled in other provinces of the ʿAbbāsid Empire and were the direct result of the decline of the caliph’s power.

In order to strengthen their armies, the ʿAbbāsid caliphs had begun early in the 9th century to form contingents of Turkish slaves known as mamlūks (“owned men”). To finance these new military formations and, in particular, to pay the Turkish commanders who headed them, the caliphs began to give them administrative grants (iqṭāʿ in Arabic, usually translated, albeit inaccurately, “fief”) consisting of tax revenues from certain territories.

In 868

Possibly as a means of both removing the governorship from the level of tribal strife and paying the central government’s Turkish mamlūks, the caliphs began assigning the administration of Egypt to Turks rather than to Arabs. But this policy resulted in no tangible improvement in the administration of Egyptian affairs until 868, when Egypt was granted as a fief to the Turkish general Babak, who chose to remain in Iraq but appointed his stepson, a young mamlūk named Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, as his agent in Egypt. Ibn Ṭūlūn’s great achievement was that he quickly established his own authority in Egypt and backed it up with an army of his own creation, powerful enough to defy the central government of Baghdad and to embark upon foreign expansion.

Ibn Ṭūlūn’s first step

Though short-lived, the Ṭūlūnid dynasty succeeded in restoring a measure of Egypt’s ancient glory and inaugurated a new phase of Egyptian history. For the first time since the pharaohs, Egypt became virtually autonomous and the bulk of its revenues remained within its borders. What is more, Egypt became the centre of a small empire when Aḥmad conquered Syria and Palestine in 878–879. These developments were paralleled in other provinces of the ʿAbbāsid empire and were the direct result of the decline of the caliph’s power.

The Ṭūlūnid dynasty (868–905)

Aḥmad’s first step upon his arrival in Egypt was to eliminate possible rivalsin Egypt. From an early date the administration of Egypt had been divided between the amīr (military governor), appointed by the caliph, and the ʿāmil (fiscal officer), who was sometimes appointed by the caliph, sometimes by the governor. When Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad entered Egypt in 868 he found the office of ʿāmil filled by one Ibn al-Mudabbir, who over a period of years had gained control of Egyptian finances, enriching himself in the process, and was therefore reluctant to acknowledge Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Aḥmad’s authority. A struggle for power soon broke out between the two, which ended four years later with the transfer of Ibn al-Mudabbir to Syria and the assumption of his duties and powers by Ibn ṬūlūnAḥmad. An even more important step for Aḥmad was the acquisition of an army that would be independent of the caliphate and loyal to Ibn Ṭūlūnhim. To build such an army, Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad resorted to the same method the caliphs themselves used—the purchase of slaves mamlūks who could be trained as military units loyal to their owner.

In 877, when Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad failed to pay Egypt’s full contribution to the ʿAbbāsid campaign against a black slave uprising during the Zanj rebellion in Iraq, the caliphal government, dominated by the caliph’s brother al-Muwaffaq, realized that Egypt was slipping from imperial control. An expedition dispatched by al-Muwaffaq to remove Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad from the governorship failed. Taking advantage of the caliphate’s preoccupation with the revolt, Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad in 878 invaded Palestine and Syria, where he occupied the principal cities and garrisoned them with his troops. Thereafter he signified his autonomy by imprinting his name on the coinage along with the name that of the caliph. Although the regent al-Muwaffaq lacked the resources to engage Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad in battle, he did have him publicly cursed in the mosques of the empire as a means of retaliation.

Internally, Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad took active measures to raise Egyptian agricultural productivity and thereby to increase tax revenues; the huge surplus he left in the state treasury at his death in 884 is a measure of his success. Another tangible indication of his achievement for Egypt is an the enormous mosque(still standing) that , the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun, which he erected in a suburb of Al-Fusṭāṭ that is now Cairo; in contrast, no building comparable in grandeur had even been contemplated by the governors who preceded him.

The great benefits Ibn Ṭūlūn Aḥmad had gained for Egypt by using keeping its resources within the country were squandered by his son and successor, Khumārawayh. He expended huge sums on luxurious appointments for his residence and paid a fortune as a dowry for a daughter he married to the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid (reigned 892–902) in 895. Nevertheless, Khumārawayh was able to maintain the Egyptian armies in the field, and he led them to victory both in Syria and in Mesopotamia. He resolved his father’s conflict with the caliphate by a combination of arms and diplomacy, so that Khumārawayh’s authority over Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia was given official caliphal recognition. This apparent strength evaporated when Khumārawayh was murdered in 896, leaving no funds with which his heir, a 14-year-old youth, heir could pay the troops. Both Egypt and Syria The entire country fell into anarchy, which lasted until 905 when a caliphal army invaded Egypt and momentarily restored it to the status of a province ruled by governors sent from Baghdad.

The Ikhshīdid dynasty (935–969)

For 30 years the governors were unable to restore stability in Egypt. During this time, Egypt was subjected to attacks from the Shīʿite Fāṭimid state dynasty based in North Africa and to the rampages of an unruly domestic army. The appointment of Muḥammad ibn Ṭughj, from Sogdiana in Central Asia, as governor in 935 led to a repetition of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Aḥmad’s achievement; by bold measures Muḥammad established his authority over the treasury and the army, reasserted Egyptian influence in Syria, thwarted the Fāṭimids, and won the governorship of the Holy Cities holy cities of Arabia (Mecca and Medina). In addition, he founded a dynasty; his sons inherited his Sogdian princely title of ikhshīd, but their authority was usurped by their Abyssinian (Ethiopian) slave tutor, Abū al-Misk Kāfūr, who eventually ruled Egypt with the caliph’s sanction. When Kāfūr died in 968 the Ikhshīdids were unable to maintain order in the army and the bureaucracy. In the following year the Fāṭimids took advantage of the disorder in Egypt to launch yet another attack, this one so successful that it led to the occupation of the country by a Berber army led by the Fāṭimid general Jawhar.

The Fāṭimid dynasty (969–1171)

The establishment of the Fāṭimid caliphate in 973 in the newly built palace city of Cairo had dramatic consequences for the evolution of Islāmic Islamic Egypt. Politically, the Fāṭimids went a step further than the Ṭūlūnids by setting up Egypt as an independent rival to the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. In fact, an avowed aim of the early Fāṭimid propagandists (Arabic: duʿāh, singular dāʿī) was to achieve world dominion, eradicating the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in the process. For a variety of reasons they achieved neither of these goals; nevertheless, at the height of Fāṭimid power at the beginning of the 11th century, the Fāṭimid caliph could claim sovereignty over the whole of coastal North African coastal regionAfrica, Sicily, the Hejaz and Yemen in Arabia, and southern Syria and Palestine. Although actual political-military control was never firm except in Egypt, allegiance paid to the Fāṭimids by their provinces was just as meaningful as that paid to the ʿAbbāsids and for a time was certainly more widespread. Even when the Fāṭimid state fell into decline later in the 11th century and abandoned its imperial vision, Egypt continued to play an independent role in the Islāmic Islamic world under the leadership of Armenian generals who had gained control of the Fāṭimid armies.

IslāmizationIslamization

It is difficult to estimate the religious change effected by the new dynasty except on the level of the governmental elite, which espoused the official doctrine of Ismāʿīlī Shīʿism—the branch that held all authority to inhere in the line of Ismāʿīl, who had predeceased both his father, the sixth ʿAlid imām Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammadat-Tamm. Because they believed that the Fāṭimid caliph was the only legitimate leader, the practice of Sunnī (orthodox) Islām Sunni Islam was theoretically outlawed in Fāṭimid domains. But the practical difficulties which the Ismāʿīlī minority faced in imposing its will on the Sunnī majority meant that the Muslim population of Egypt remained predominantly Sunnī Sunni throughout the Fāṭimid period. Certainly there was no public outcry when Saladin, who founded the Ayyūbid dynasty, restored Egypt to Sunnī Sunni rule in 1171. Regarding non-Muslims, the Fāṭimids, with one notable exception, were known for their tolerance, and the Copts continued to serve in the bureaucracy. Several Copts held the highest administrative post—the vizierate—without changing their religion. Jews also figured prominently in the government; in fact, a Jewish convert to IslāmIslam, Ibn Killis, was the first Fāṭimid vizier and is credited with laying the foundations of the Fāṭimid administrative system, in which the viziers exercised great power. Christians and Jews even managed to survive the reign of the so-called mad caliph, al-Ḥākim (ruled reigned 996–1021), who ordered the destruction of Christian churches in Fāṭimid territory, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and offered his non-Muslim subjects the choice of conversion to Islām Islam or expulsion from Fāṭimid territory. This period of persecution undoubtedly accelerated the rate of conversion to IslāmIslam, if only on a temporary and superficial level.

In comparison with Iraq, Egypt contributed relatively little to Arabic literature and Islāmic Islamic learning during the early ʿAbbāsid period. But the Fāṭimids’ intense interest in propagating Ismāʿīlī Shīʿism through a network of missionary propagandists made Egypt an important religious and intellectual centre. The foundation founding of the mosque-college of al-Azhar as well as of other academies drew Shīʿite scholars to Egypt from all over the Muslim world and stimulated the production of original contributions in literature, philosophy, and the Islāmic Islamic sciences.

Arabization

The Arabization of Egypt continued at a gradual pace. The early Fāṭimids’ reliance on Amazigh (Berber) troops was soon balanced by the importation of Turkish, Sudanese, and Arab contingents. The Fāṭimids are said to have used thousands of nomadic Arabs in the Egyptian cavalry and to have further stimulated Arabization by settling large numbers of Arabian tribesmen in Upper Egypt to deprive the Qarmaṭians—their Ismāʿīlī enemies rivals in Iraq and Arabia—of Arab tribal support. On the other hand, the Fāṭimids reduced the Arab population of Egypt in the mid-11th century , when they incited the Banū Hilāl and the Banū Ṣulaym tribes to emigrate from Egypt into the neighbouring Berber Amazigh kingdom of IfrīqīyahIfrīqiyyah.

Growth of trade

One of the most far-reaching changes in Fāṭimid times was the growth of Egyptian commerce, especially in Al-Fusṭāṭ, which had become the port city for Cairo, the Fāṭimid capital. Theretofore, Iraq in the east and Tunisia in the west had been flourishing centres for trade conducted both within the Muslim world and between the Muslim and the Christian empires of the West. A number of factors contributed to alter this situation in favour of Egypt. As centralized power declined in Iraq, Mesopotamia, and Syria during the 9th and 10th centuries, traffic on the trade routes across these areas also declined. In Egypt, however, the establishment of a strong government, which soon controlled the Red Sea and maintained a strong navy in the eastern Mediterranean, offered an attractive alternative for the international transit trade between the Orient Eastern and ChristendomWestern worlds. In addition to having the political stability essential for trade, the Fāṭimids encouraged commerce by their low tariff policy and their noninterference in the affairs of merchants who did business in Egypt. These factors, along with increased European mercantile activity in the Italian cities, helped restore Egypt as a great international entrepôt.

The end of the Fāṭimid dynasty

The Fāṭimid achievement in restoring to Egypt a measure of its ancient glory was remarkable but brief. Halfway through their history the political-religious authority of the Fāṭimid caliphs was vitiated by military uprisings that could be put down only by force. By 1163 the Fāṭimid caliph had been shunted aside in a power struggle between the vizier and the chamberlain, who were themselves so impotent that they had to seek help from the Sunnī Sunni and even from the crusader Crusader powers of Syria and Palestine. Thus began a series of invasions at the behest of Fāṭimid officials, which ended in 1169 with the occupation of Egypt by an army from Syria, one of whose commanders—Saladin—was appointed Fāṭimid vizier. Two years later Saladin restored Egypt to ʿAbbāsid allegiance, abolished the Fāṭimid caliphate, and, in effect, established the Ayyūbid dynasty.

The Ayyūbid dynasty (1171–1250)

Under Saladin and his descendants, Egypt was reintegrated into the Sunnī Sunni world of the Eastern eastern caliphate. Indeed, during the period of the Crusades, Egypt became champion of that world against the crusaders Crusaders and, as such, chief target of the crusader Crusader armies. But this was a gradual process that required Saladin first to build an army strong enough to establish his power in Egypt and then to unite the factions of Syria and Mesopotamia under his leadership against the FranksEuropeans. By so doing he reconstituted the Egyptian empire, which included, in addition to the areas just named, Yemen, the Hejaz, and, with the fall his victory at Ḥaṭṭīn and subsequent capture of Jerusalem (1187), a major part of the Holy Land.

The abolition of the Fāṭimid caliphate and the official reinstitution of Sunnī Islām Sunni Islam seems to have caused little perturbation in Egypt except for an uprising by the Fāṭimid palace guard, quickly suppressed. This undoubtedly means meant that Ismāʿīlī Shīʿism was confined to Fāṭimid ruling circles.

Saladin’s policies

Saladin’s remission of all taxes not explicitly sanctioned by Islāmic Islamic law must have contributed to his own popularity as well as to the stability of his regime. To ensure the defense of his state against both internal and external enemies, he strengthened the fortifications of Cairo by building a citadel and extending the Fāṭimid city walls. Despite the major military and propagandistic efforts he mounted against the crusadersCrusaders, Saladin continued to treat the Christians of Egypt with tolerance; the Coptic Church thrived under the Ayyūbids, and Copts still served the government. Saladin also treated the Christians of Jerusalem with magnanimity after the conquest of that city. Under Saladin the Jewish community enjoyed protection, and such noted scholars as Moses Maimonides—who was the sultan’s personal physician—settled there.

Much to the consternation of the popes, trade between Egypt and the Italian city-states remained brisk, and the Egyptians were able to use raw materials provided by the Italian merchants to forge weapons against the crusadersCrusaders. The administration of Egypt stayed in the hands of the vast, mainly civilian, bureaucracy , but was supervised by military officials.

Power struggles

The Ayyūbids introduced a significant change in the governance of their empire that was decisive for the history of their rule in Egypt. Though the Ayyūbids were themselves of Kurdish descent, Saladin followed the Turkish practice of assigning the provinces as fiefdoms to members of his family. In theory, such a measure would ensure the loyalty of the provinces to the central government of Egypt through the loyalty of Ayyūbid kinsmen to their family leader. In practice, however, the measure led to recurrent power struggles in which each governor used his province as a base from which to defy the supreme Ayyūbid power of Egypt. The sultans al-Malik al-ʿĀdil (died 1218reigned 1207–18) and al-Malik al-Kāmil (died 1238reigned 1218–38) each succeeded in reuniting Syria and Egypt under his own leadership. Kāmil, especially, was able to exploit Frankish attacks—in the form of the Fifth Crusade, directed against Damietta—to rally family and provincial support for the defense of Egypt. Nevertheless, given the dissension within the Ayyūbid empire, it was clearly in the interest of the Egyptian sultan to reach a peaceful settlement with the crusadersCrusaders; this was achieved in 1229 by a truce between Kāmil and the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. The agreement stipulated that Kāmil exchange possession of Jerusalem and other territory in the Holy Land for Frederick’s guarantee to support the sultan against aggression from any source.

Growth of Mamlūk armies

The only real security for Ayyūbid Egypt lay in its independent military strength. This explains why one of the last sultans, al-Malik aṣ-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb (died 1249reigned 1239, 1245–49), resorted to increased purchase of Turkish slaves—called Mamlūks, a name derived from the Arabic word for slave—as a mamlūks as a means of manning his armies. Although slave troops had formed an important part of Egyptian armies since the time of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, their strength had been checked by racial dissension among the various slave units and by the presence of nonslave elements. But after the death of aṣal-Ṣāliḥ Ṣālih Ayyūb in the course of the Sixth Crusade, which the Egyptians defeated thanks to the Mamlūk corps, the Mamlūks were able to exploit a palace feud and to elevate a member of their own ranks to the sultanate, which Crusade of Louis IX—which mamlūk troops were crucial in thwarting—a group of rebellious mamlūks assassinated his son and successor Tūrān-Shah and elevated al-Ṣālih’s wife Shajar al-Durr to the throne in 1250. Her brief rule marked the first time a woman had ruled Egypt since Roman times, but, pressured by the rebellious Ayyūbid emirs in Syria and by the ʿAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad (all of whom demanded that a man rule Egypt), she married a mamlūk general named Aybak. The assassination in 1257 of both queen and consort occurred barely a year before Mongol armies stormed Baghdad and put an end to the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, leaving military slaves to rule Egypt with no legitimizing authority. High ranking mamlūks had played a role in politics in the Islamic world since the 9th century; some had even seized political control (as in the Ghaznavid dynasty of Turkey). But for the first time a system arose—in what otherwise might have been a dynastic interregnum—wherein former slaves stood at the head of a self-perpetuating slave dynasty. This new order, which came at a time when the light of Baghdad had been extinguished and which lasted for two and a half centuriesand , brought Egypt to the peak of its evolution in the medieval perioda new cultural and political flowering.

The Mamlūk and Ottoman periods (1250–1800)

The Mamlūk dynasty rulers (1250–1517)

During the Mamlūk period Egypt became the unrivaled political, economic, and cultural centre of the eastern Arabic-speaking zone of the Muslim world. Symbolic of this development was the reestablishment in 1261 under the Mamlūks Mamlūk rulers of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in Cairo (the Mongols had abolished the caliphate when they invaded Baghdad in 1258)caliphate—destroyed by the Mongols in their sack of Baghdad three years earlier—with the arrival in Cairo of a youth claiming ʿAbbāsid lineage. Although the caliph enjoyed little authorityand , had no power, and was of dubious authenticity, the mere fact that the Mamlūks chose to maintain the institution in Cairo is a measure of their determination to dominate Arabic Islāmthe Arab-Islamic world and to legitimize their own rule. It is curious that the Mamlūks—all of whom were of non-Arab (most were Turks and, later, Circassians), non-Muslim origin and some of whom knew little if any Arabic—established Arabic—founded a regime that saved a substantial portion of Muslim territory from pagan domination and established Egypt’s supremacy in Arabic culture.Arab culture.

Mamlūk legitimacy also rested on the regime’s early military successes, particularly those against the Mongols, who were seen by many contemporaries as undefeatable and as a threat to the very existence of Islam as a political culture. In 1260, two years after the demoralizing sack of Baghdad, the Mongol leader sent an ambassador to Egypt to deliver terms of surrender. The Mamlūk leader, Quṭuz, who had come to power after the death of Aybak and Shajar al-Durr, ordered the Mongol ambassador put to death, thus insuring war against what seemed an unbeatable adversary. After their victory at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt later that year, however, the Mamlūks were able to roll back the Mongol armies from the Levant. This victory, and the success of subsequent Mamlūk sultans against the Crusaders in Syria and Palestine, lent a certain sanction to Mamlūk rule that it may otherwise never have attained.

Political life

The political history of the Mamlūk state is complex; during their 264-year reign, no fewer than 45 Mamlūks gained the sultanate, and once, in desperate circumstances, a caliph (in 1412) was briefly installed as sultan. At times individual Mamlūks succeeded in establishing dynasties, most notably Sultan Qalāʾūn (ruled reigned 1279–90), whose progeny ruled Egypt, with two short interruptions, until 1382. Often the Mamlūks chose to allow a sultan’s son to succeed his father only for as long as it took another Mamlūk to build up enough support to seize the throne for himself. In reality there was no principle of legitimacy other than force, for without sufficient military power a sultan could expect to be overthrown by a stronger Mamlūk. It was a period of raw political brutality seldom paralleled in world history.

Nevertheless, several sultans succeeded in harnessing the energies of the Mamlūk system to establish internal stability and to embark on foreign conquests. Soon after the Mamlūk victory over the Mongols at ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260, Baybars I seized power by assassinating Quṭuz. He was the true founder of the Mamlūk state, and he campaigned actively and with success against the remaining crusader Crusader possessions in Palestine and Syria. He ruled until 1277. During the long reign of al-Malik anal-Nāṣir (ruled reigned 1293–1341), the Mamlūks concluded a truce with the Mongols (1323) after several major battles and, despite widespread famine, outbreaks of religious strife, and Bedouin uprisings, maintained economic prosperity in Egypt and peaceful relations with foreign powers , both Muslim and Christian.

Although the state began to decline politically and economically after the death of Nāṣir in 1341, Egypt continued to dominate Eastern Arabdomthe eastern Arab world. But the cumulative effect of the plague , (which swept Egypt in 1348 and on many occasions subsequently; ), Timur’s victory in Syria in 1400; , and Egypt’s loss to the Portuguese of control over the Indian trade, along with the sultans’ inability to keep their refractory Mamlūk corps under control, gradually sapped the strength of the state. The best efforts of such a vigorous sultan as Qāʾit Bāy (ruled reigned 1468–96) failed to make Egypt strong enough to defend its Syrian empire provinces against raids by the Turkoman states of Anatolia and Azerbaijan and campaigns of the Ottoman TurksEmpire.

Contributions to Arabic culture

By the time of the Mamlūks, the Arabization of Egypt must have been almost complete. Arabic had been the language of the bureaucracy since the early 8th century and the language of religion and culture even longer. Moreover, the prevalence of Arabic as a written and spoken language is attested by the discovery in the geniza genizah(storeroom) of a Cairo synagogue of thousands of letters and documents—called the “Geniza Documents”—dating Genizah Documents—dating from the 11th through the 13th century. Though often written in Hebrew characters, the actual language of most of these documents is Arabic, which proves that Arabic was widely used even by non-Muslims. The main incentive for learning Arabic must have come from the desire of a subject population to learn the administrative and scholarly language of the ruling and learned elite. The immigration of Arab tribesmen during the early centuries of the occupation, and their intermarriage with the indigenous inhabitants, must also have contributed to the gradual spread of Arabic in Egypt.

The specific Mamlūk contribution to Arabic culture (i.e., the ethnically diverse community united by the Arabic language), however, lay above all in the military achievement. By defeating the Mongols, the Mamlūks provided a haven in Syria and in Egypt for Muslims fleeing from Mongol devastation. The extent of this haven was narrowed by subsequent Mongol attacks against Syria, one of which led to a brief Mongol occupation of Damascus in 1294–95, so that Egypt received an influx of refugees from Syria itself as well as from areas farther east.

This accidental displacement of scholars and artisans into Egypt does not, however, wholly account for the efflorescence of certain types of cultural activity under the Mamlūks. In the same way as that they supported the caliphate as a visible symbol of their legitimate claim to rule Islāmic Islamic territory, the Mamlūks cultivated and patronized religious leaders whose skills they needed in administering their empire and in directing the religious sentiments of the masses into safe (i.e., nondisruptive) channels. Those divines who cooperated with the state were rewarded with government offices , in the case of the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) , and with endowed zāwiyahs (monasteries, ) in the case of the Ṣūfīs Sufis (mystics). On the other hand, those who dared criticize the prevailing social and moral order were thrown into prison(; such was the fate of the famous renowned legist , Ibn TaymīyahTaymiyyah (1263–1328), who, having emigrated from Mesopotamia in order to escape the Mongols, was incarcerated in Cairo by the Mamlūks and for spreading doctrines that their religious functionaries for spreading seditious doctrines)considered heresy.

Concrete evidence of the stimulus the Mamlūks gave to cultural life in an era of economic prosperity can be found chiefly in the fields of architecture and historiography. Dozens of public buildings erected under Mamlūk patronage are still standing in Cairo and include mosques, madrasahs (colleges), hospitals, monasterieszāwiyahs, and caravansaries. Historical writing under the Mamlūks was equally monumental, in the form of immense chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and encyclopaedias. (See Ibn Khallikān, al-ʿUmarī, Ibn Kathīr, Ibn Khaldūn.)

Religious life

The Mamlūk period is also important in Egyptian religious history. With few and therefore notable exceptions, the Muslim rulers of Egypt had seldom interfered with the lives of their Christian and Jewish subjects so long as these groups paid the special taxes (known as jizyah) levied on them in exchange for state protection. Indeed, both Copts and Jews had always served in the Muslim bureaucracy, sometimes in the very highest administrative positions. Even the Crusades apparently failed to upset the delicate balance between Muslims and Christians. Trade with the Italian city-states had certainly continued, and there is no evidence that the local Christians were held accountable for the crusader Crusader invasions of Egypt.While it is true that Saladin dismissed all Copts from the bureaucracy and imposed sumptuary laws on them, this policy was abandoned by his successors in their desire to reach an accommodation with the crusaders.

With the establishment of the Mamlūk dynastysultanate, however, it is generally agreed that the lot of the Christians, both in Egypt and in Syria, took a distinct turn for the worse. One indication of this change is the increased production of anti-Christian polemics written by Muslim theologians. A possible reason for the change may have been the association of Christians with the Mongol peril. Because the Mongols used Christian auxiliaries in their armies—Georgians and Armenians in particular—they often spared the Christian populations of towns they conquered, while slaughtering the Muslims. Also, the diplomatic efforts aimed at uniting the Mongols with Christian European powers in a joint crusade Crusade against the Muslims might have contributed to the Mamlūks’ distrust of the Christians. But the dissatisfaction seems to have originated not so much with the Mamlūk rulers as with the masses, and it seems to have been directed not so much against Christians’ sympathy for the Mongols as against their privileged position and role in the Mamlūk state.

On several occasions popular resentment against the Copts’ conspicuous wealth and their employment in the government was manifested in public demonstrations. Both Muslims and Christians resorted to arson, burning the others’ sanctuaries , to express their hatred. Under such pressure, the Mamlūk government dismissed Christians from the bureaucracy on no fewer than nine occasions between 1279 and 1447, and in 1301 it . (It was usually necessary to appoint new Copts, since they alone understood the accounting system that had been used since pharaonic times.) In 1301 the Mamlūks ordered all the churches in Egypt to be closed. As a result of these intermittent persecutions and the destruction of churches, it is believed that the rate of conversion to Islām Islam accelerated markedly in the Mamlūk period and that Coptic virtually disappeared except as a liturgical language. By the end of the Mamlūk dynastyrule, the Muslims may well have reached the same numerical superiority that they enjoy in modern times—a ratio of more than 10 to oneperhaps 10:1.

Economic life

In trade and commerce, the Mamlūk period marks the zenith of medieval Egyptian economic history. During the 13th and 14th centuries (as long, that is, as the sultanate was able to maintain order in Egypt), trade was heavy with Mediterranean and Black Sea sea ports and with India. The Oriental trade was controlled largely by a group of Muslim merchants known as the Kārimīs; the Mediterranean trade was left to European traders, whom the Mamlūks allowed certain privileges in Alexandria. By the 15th century, however, Egypt’s commercial importance rapidly deteriorated as the result of population losses caused by the plague, increased government interference in commerce, Bedouin raiding, and Portuguese competition in the Indian trade.

The Ottomans (1517–1798)

With the Ottomans’ defeat of the Mamlūks in 1516–17, Egyptian medieval history had come full circle, as Egypt reverted to the status of a province governed from Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Again the country was exploited as a source of taxation for the benefit of an imperial government and as a base for foreign expansion. The economic decline that had begun under the late Mamlūks continued, and with it came a decline in Egyptian culture.

Some historians attribute the lethargy of Ottoman Egypt in this era solely to Ottoman dominationthe rule of Constantinople. But, although Ottoman policy was geared to imperial, not Egyptian, needs, it was obviously to the rulers’ benefit to provide a stable government that would maintain Egyptian agriculture at a high level of productivity and would promote the transit trade. To a certain extent Ottoman actions served these purposes. The decisive factor that ultimately undermined Ottoman policies was the perpetuation of the former Mamlūk elite; though they collaborated with the Ottoman government, they often defied it and in the end they dominated ultimately came to dominate it. By and large, the history of Ottoman Egypt concerns the process by which the conquered Mamlūks reasserted their power within the Egyptian state.

The Ottoman conquest

From the conquest itself, the Ottoman presence in Egypt was entangled with Mamlūk factionalism. There is no doubt that the Ottomans invaded Syria in 1516 to break thwart an incipient coalition against Ottoman expansion between the Ṣafavids Ṣafavid dynasty of Persia and the Mamlūks of Egypt and Syria. The long-standing enmity between the Ottomans and the Mamlūks arose from their contest to control the Turkoman frontier states north of Syria. After the Ottomans strengthened their hold over eastern Anatolia in 1514, it was only natural that the Mamlūks should attempt to bolster their forces in northern Syria and exchange diplomatic missions with the Ṣafavids. The Ottoman sultan Selim I (the Grim) responded by attacking the reinforced Mamlūk army in Syria, probably as a preliminary step in a new campaign against the Ṣafavids. In 1516, after Selim had defeated the Mamlūks at Marj Dābiq (north of Aleppo), Ottoman goals had probably been met, especially since the Mamlūk sultan Qānṣūh al-Ghaurī Ghawrī died in the battle. But the Mamlūks rallied around a new sultan in Cairo , who refused to accept Selim’s terms for a settlement. Spurred on by the Mamlūk traitor Khair Khayr Bey, Selim marched against Egypt in 1517, defeated the Mamlūks, and installed Khair Khayr Bey as Ottoman governor. Khair Khayr Bey died in 15521522; thereafter, the Ottoman viceroy (called vali), with the title of pasha, was sent from IstanbulConstantinople.

Ottoman administration

In 1525 the Ottoman administration of Egypt was defined and codified by the Ottoman grand vizier, İbrahim Paşa, who was dispatched to Egypt for this purpose by the sultan Süleyman I (the Magnificent). According to the terms of İbrahim Paşa’s decree (qanuņkanun-name), Egypt was to be ruled by a viceroy aided by an advisory council (divan) and an army comprising both Ottoman and local corps. The collection of taxes and the administration of the four provinces into which Egypt was divided were assigned to inspectors (kashifs). Although the Egyptian government was headed by bureaucratic officials sent from IstanbulConstantinople, and supported by Ottoman troops, the Mamlūks were able to penetrate both the bureaucracy and the army. The kashifs were often drawn from Mamlūk ranks; three of the seven military corps formed by the Ottomans in the 16th century were recruited in Egypt, one of which—the Circassians—was composed of Circassian Mamlūks. Their service in the army enabled the Mamlūk amirs to secure high-ranking military posts that entitled them to serve on the divan itself.

By the 17th century a distinct elite bearing the title of bey had emerged, which consisted largely of Mamlūk amirsemirs. These beys held no specific offices but were nevertheless paid a salary by the Ottoman government. The elite was perpetuated through the old Mamlūk system of purchasing slaves, giving them military training, then freeing them and attaching them to one of the great Mamlūk houses of Egypt. Thus, for all practical purposes, the Mamlūks maintained themselves as an elite throughout the Ottoman period. They were no longer the only political-military elite, as they had been in the past, but they ultimately succeeded in reestablishing their dominance. Yet the chief obstacle to the growth of their power was not so much the Ottoman ruling hierarchy as it was their own factionalism. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Mamlūks were divided into two great rival houses—the Faqariyya Faqāriyyah and the Qasimiyya—whose Qāsimiyyah—whose mutual hostility often broke out into fighting and impaired the strength of the Mamlūks as a bloc.

Mamlūk power under the Ottomans

In spite of internal dissension and the resistance of the non-Mamlūk hierarchy, the Mamlūks had emerged by the early 18th century as the supreme power in Egyptian politics. While the beys continued to acknowledge the authority of the Ottoman viceroy and to send tribute to IstanbulConstantinople, the strongest single figure in Egypt was the bey who held the newly coined title of shaykh al-balad (“chief of the city”), which signified that he was recognized by the other beys as their chief. The Mamlūks’ rise to power was climaxed by the careers of two amirs—ʿAlī emirs—ʿAlī Bey and Abū Dhahab—both of whom secured from the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government) de facto recognition of their autonomy in Egypt (1768–761769–75) and even undertook military campaigns in Syria and the Hejaz. The Ottomans attempted to end the Mamlūk domination by sending an army to Egypt in 1786. Although it was initially successful, this attempt failed and the troops were withdrawn a year later. A Mamlūk duumvirate (two-person ruling coalition) was reestablished , and it consisting of Murād Bey and Ibrāhīm Bey and lasted until Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.

Expansion

During the 16th century, when their regime in Egypt was strongest, the Ottomans used Egypt as a base for expansion to the south. Like the Mamlūk rulers before them, they attempted to control the southern approaches to Egypt by instituting their authority in Nubia; this they achieved by annexing Nubia as far south as the Third Cataract of the Nile River. Elsewhere, they undertook to reassert Egyptian command of the Red Sea, which the Portuguese had begun to contest during the early 16th century. Ottoman fleets and troops captured Yemen and Aden (1536–46) and thus dominated the lower Red Sea; in 1557 they strengthened this position by setting up a colony on the Abyssinian coast at Mitsiwa (now Massawa, Eritrea). In the 17th century these outposts began to lose their importance as Ottoman and Portuguese power began started to decline and the Dutch took over the spice trade.

Culture

Given the political instability and the economic decline that had prevailed in Egypt since late Mamlūk times, it is not surprising that the culture of Ottoman Egypt lacked vitality. Perhaps the most telling example of intellectual quiescence was the dramatic decline in the quantity of historical works produced in Egypt. As already noted, the Mamlūk period is renowned for the number and quality of its historians, partly because the amirs emirs patronized court historians; by contrast, in almost three centuries of Ottoman rule, Egypt produced only one historian worthy of note, Abd al-Jabartī (died 1825)Rahman al-Jabartī in the late 18th to early 19th century, famous for his observations on the French occupation. The Ottomans also fell short of the Mamlūks’ achievement in architecture; there is no lack of public buildings erected under Ottoman patronage, but even the best of these are imitations of the Byzantine basilica, which had been adopted as the model for mosques.

Religious affairs

Like all previous Muslim governments, the Ottomans continued to employ Copts in the financial offices of the bureaucracy. The Ottomans allowed the caliphate, so assiduously preserved in its nominal form by the Mamlūks, to lapse. At first the caliph was installed in Istanbul Constantinople by Selim the GrimI. Later the caliph—the caliph—purportedly the last of the ‘Abbāsid line—returned to Egypt, where he died in the reign of Süleyman. The claim that the caliph had transferred his authority to the Ottoman sultan is generally considered an 18th-century invention.

From the French to the British occupation (1798–1882)

The French occupation and its consequences (1798–1805)

Although several projects for a French occupation of Egypt had been advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries, the purpose of the expedition that sailed under Napoleon Bonaparte I from Toulon in May 1798 was specifically connected with the war against Britain. Bonaparte Napoleon had discounted the feasibility of an invasion of England but hoped, by occupying Egypt, to damage British trade, to threaten India, and to obtain assets for bargaining in any future peace settlement. Meanwhile, as a colony under the benevolent and progressive administration of Revolutionary France, Egypt would was to be regenerated and would regain its ancient prosperity. The military and naval forces were therefore accompanied by a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate and report the past and present condition of the country.

Eluding the British Mediterranean fleet under Lord Horatio Nelson, the French landed at Abū Qīr (Aboukir) Bay on July 1 and took Alexandria the next day. In an Arabic proclamation, Bonaparte Napoleon assured the Egyptians that he came as a friend to Islām Islam and the Ottoman sultan, to punish the usurping Mamlūks and to liberate the people. From Alexandria the French advanced on Cairo, defeating Murad Murād Bey at Shubrākhīt (July 13), and again decisively at Imbābah, opposite Cairo in the so-called Battle of the Pyramids on July 21. Murad Murād fled to Upper Egypt, while his colleague, Ibrāhīm Bey, together with the Ottoman viceroy, made his way to Syria.

After entering Cairo (July 25), Bonaparte Napoleon sought to conciliate the population, especially the religious leaders (ʿulamāʾ), by demonstrating his sympathy with Islām Islam and by establishing councils (divans) as a means of consulting Egyptian opinion. The destruction of the French fleet at Abū Qīr by Nelson in the so-called Battle of the Nile on August 1 virtually cut Bonaparte’s Napoleon’s communications and made it necessary for him to consolidate his rule and to make the expeditionary force as self-sufficient as possible. The savants, organized in the Institut d’Égypte, played their part in this. Meanwhile, Egyptian resentment at of alien rule, administrative innovations, and the growing fiscal burden of military occupation was exacerbated when the Ottoman sultan, Selim III (1789–1807), declared war on France on September 11. An unforeseen revolt in Cairo on October 21 was suppressed after an artillery bombardment that ended any hopes of cordial Franco-Egyptian coexistence.

Ottoman Syria, dominated by Aḥmad al-Jazzār, the governor of Acre (now ʿAkko, Israel), was the base from which French-occupied Egypt might most easily be threatened, and Bonaparte Napoleon resolved to deny it to his enemies. His invasion force crossed the frontier in February 1799 but failed to take Acre after a protracted siege (March 19–May 20), and Bonaparte Napoleon evacuated Syrian territory. A seaborne Ottoman invading force landed at Abū Qīr in July but failed to maintain its bridgehead. At this point Bonaparte Napoleon resolved to return to France, and he succeeded in slipping awayon August 22, past the British fleet, on August 22.

His successor as general in chief, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, viewed the situation of the expeditionary force with pessimism and, like many of the soldiers, wished to return to the theatre of war in Europe. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Ottomans and by the Convention of alAl-ʿArīsh (Jan. 24, 1800) agreed to evacuate Egypt. Sir Sydney Smith, the British naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, sponsored the convention, but in this he had exceeded his powers and was instructed by his superior officer, Admiral Lord Keith, to require the French to surrender as prisoners of war. Although the Ottoman reoccupation was well underwayunder way, Kléber and the French determined on resistance and defeated the Turkish forces at the Battle of Heliopolis (March 20). A second revolt of Cairo, fomented by Ottoman fugitives, took about a month to suppress; but French authority had been restored when Kléber was assassinated by a Syrian Muslim, Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī, on June 14.

His successor, ʿAbd Allāh Jacques Menou, a French officer (and former nobleman) who had turned Muslim, was determined to maintain the occupation and administered at first a tolerably settled country, although he lacked the prestige of his two predecessors. In 1801 a threefold invasion of Egypt began. British troops were landed at Abū Qīr in March, while the Ottomans advanced from Syria. Shortly afterward, British Indian forces were landed at Quṣayr on the Red Sea coast. The French garrison in Cairo capitulated in June and Menou himself at Alexandria in September.

The brief episode of the French occupation was to be significant for Egypt in several ways. The arrival of a European army accompanied by scholars and scientists appropriately inaugurated the impact of the West, which was to be felt increasingly in the next 150 yearsafterward. Egypt, protected insulated for five centuries by the Mamlūk and Ottoman sultanates, was no longer immune from European attack: influence; it had become an object of the contending policies of France and Britain, a part of the “Eastern Eastern Question. ” Bonaparte’s Napoleon’s savants had little success in interpreting Western culture to the traditionalist ʿulamāʾ of Cairo; their achievement was rather to unveil Egypt to Europe. They uncovered the celebrated Rosetta Stone(see photograph), which held a trilingual inscription making it possible to decipher hieroglyphs and which thus laid the foundation of modern Egyptology. Their reports and monographs were collected in the monumental Description de l’Égypte (“Description of Egypt”), which was published in parts from 1809 to 1828 in Paris.

Of more immediate consequence for Egypt was the effect of the French occupation upon on internal politics. The Mamlūk ascendancy was fatally weakened. Murad Murād Bey, who had made his peace with the French, died shortly before their capitulation in 1801; and Ibrāhīm Bey, who returned to Egypt with the Ottomans, had henceforward little power. The new Mamlūk leaders, ʿUthmān Bey al-Bardīsī (died 1806) and Muḥammad Bey al-Alfī (died 1807), former retainers of MuradMurād, headed rival factions and had in any case to reckon with the British and Ottoman occupation forces. In March 1803 the British troops were evacuated in accordance with the Peace Treaty of Amiens (March 27, 1802). But the Ottomans, determined to reassert their control over Egypt, remained, establishing their power through a viceroy and an occupying army, in which the most effective fighting force was an Albanian contingent. The Albanians, however, acted as an independent party and in May 1803 mutinied and installed their own leader as acting viceroy. When he was assassinated shortly afterward, the command of the Albanians passed to his lieutenant, Muḥammad ʿAlī (born 1769reigned 1805–49), who, during the ensuing two years, cautiously strengthened his own position at the expense of both the Mamlūks and the Ottomans.

Muḥammad ʿAlī and his successors (1805–82)

In May 1805 a revolt broke out in Cairo against the Ottoman viceroy, Khūrshīd Pasha. The ʿulamāʾ invested Muḥammad ʿAlī as viceroy. For some weeks there was street fighting, and Khūrshīd was besieged in the Citadelcitadel. In July Sultan Selim III confirmed Muḥammad ʿAlī in office and the revolt ended.

Muḥammad ʿAlī’s viceroyalty was marked by a series of military successes, some of which were attended by political failures that frustrated his wider aims. After the renewal of war between Britain and Napoleonic France in 1803, Egypt again became an area of strategic significance. A British expedition occupied Alexandria in 1807 but failed to capture Rosetta and, after a defeat at the hands of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s forces, was allowed to withdraw.

Military expansion

In Arabia, the domination of Islam’s holy cities, Mecca and Medina, by puritanical Wahhābī Muslims was a serious embarrassment to the Ottoman sultan, who was the titular overlord of the Arabian territory of the Hejaz and the leading Muslim sovereign. At the invitation of Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808–39), Muḥammad ʿAlī sent an expedition to Arabia that between 1811 and 1813 expelled the Wahhābīs from the Hejaz. In a further campaign (1816–18), Ibrāhīm Pasha, the viceroy’s eldest son, defeated the Wahhābīs in their homeland of Najd and brought central Arabia within Egyptian control. In 1820–21 Muḥammad ʿAlī sent an expedition up the Nile River and conquered much of what is now the northern portion of the Sudan. By so doing, he made himself master of one of the principal channels of the slave trade and began an African empire that was to be expanded under his successors.

After the outbreak of the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule, Muḥammad ʿAlī, at Sultan Mahmud II’s Mahmud’s request, suppressed the Cretan revolt in 1822. In 1825 Ibrāhīm began a victorious campaign in the Morea in southern Greece, where his military success provoked intervention by the European powers and brought on the destruction of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets at the Battle of Navarino in October 1827(Oct. 20, 1827). The Morea was evacuated the following year.

In 1831 Muḥammad ʿAlī embarked upon the invasion of Syria. His pretext was a quarrel with the governor of Acre, but deeper considerations were involved, particularly the growing strength of the Sultansultan, which might threaten his own autonomy. Syria, moreover, was strategically important; and its products, especially timber, usefully complemented the Egyptian economy. The Ottoman army was defeated viceroy’s forces defeated the Ottomans at Kütahya near Konya in Anatolia (December 1832), and in 1833 the Sultan sultan ceded the his Syrian provinces to Muḥammad ʿAlī.

In 1839 Ottoman forces reentered Syria but were defeated by Ibrāhīm at the Battle of Nizip (NezibJune 24). A fortnight later Mahmud II died, and the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of dissolution; it was saved only by European intervention. In 1840 the European powers compelled Ibrāhīm was compelled to evacuate Syria. Muḥammad ʿAlī’s Arabian empire (which since 1833 had extended into the Yemen) crumbled at the same time. Although in June 1842 1841 the new sultan, Abdülmecid I (reigned 1839–61), conferred on the family of Muḥammad ʿAlī the hereditary rule of Egypt, the viceroy’s powers were declining. Because of his the viceroy’s growing senility, Ibrāhīm succeeded him (July 1848) but his took power in July 1848. But the son’s reign lasted only a few months until his death the following November. The next viceroy was ʿAbbās I (reigned 1848–54), the eldest grandson of Muḥammad ʿAlī . The old viceroy himself (who died in 1849).

Administrative changes

Muḥammad ʿAlī’s military exploits would not have been possible but for radical changes in the administration of Egypt itself. Muḥammad ʿAlī was a pragmatic statesman whose principal objective was to secure for himself and his family in the unchallenged possession of Egypt. His immediate problem on his accession was to deal with the Mamlūks, who still dominated much of the country, and the ʿulamāʾ, who had helped him to power. The strength of these two groups rested largely on their control of the agricultural land of Egypt and the revenues arising therefrom. Gradually, between 1805 and 1815, Muḥammad ʿAlī eroded the system of tax farming (iltizām) that had diverted most of the revenues to the Mamlūks and other notables, imposed the direct levy of taxes, expropriated the landholders, and carried out a new tax survey. In 1809 he defeated divided and outmaneuvered the ʿulamāʾ, and in 1811 he massacred lured many of the Mamlūk leaders in Cairo, while to a celebration at the citadel, where he had them massacred. Ibrāhīm expelled their survivors from Upper Egypt, effectively destroying them as a political force.

Muḥammad ʿAlī thus became effectively the sole landholder in Egypt, with a monopoly over trade in crops, in Egypt, although later in his reign he made considerable grants of land to his family and dependents. The monopoly system was extended in due course from primary materials to manufactures, with the establishment of state control over the textile industry. Muḥammad ʿAlī’s ambitious hopes of promoting an industrial revolution in Egypt were not realized, fundamentally because of the lack of available sources of power. The monopolies were resented by European merchants in Egypt and clashed with the economic doctrine of free trade upheld by the British government. Although a free-trade convention that was concluded between Britain and the Ottoman Empire in 1838 (the Convention of Balta Liman) was technically binding on Egypt, Muḥammad ʿAlī succeeded in evading its application up to and even after the reversal of his fortunes in 1840-411840–41.

The old-style military forces (including the Albanians) , on whom Muḥammad ʿAlī relied against his internal opponents and who conquered the Hejaz, Najd, and the northern Sudan , were heterogenous heterogeneous and unruly. An attempt to introduce Western methods of training in 1815 provoked a mutiny. Muḥammad ʿAlī then decided to form an army of slave - troops dependent wholly upon himself and trained by European instructors. The conquest of the Sudan was intended to provide the recruits. But the slaves, encamped at Aswān, died wholesale, and Muḥammad ʿAlī had to look elsewhere for the mass seek most of his troops elsewhere. In 1823 he took the momentous step of conscripting Egyptian peasants for the rank and file of his “new model army.” On the other hand, the officers were mostly Turkish-speaking Ottomans, while the director of the whole enterprise, Sulaymān Pasha (Colonel Col. Joseph Sève), was a former French officer. The conscription was brutally administered and military life harsh. There were several ineffective peasant revolts, while flight and some potential inductees fled to the towns and (before 1831) to Syria produced rural depopulation and a decline in cultivationor to the desert.

As reorganization proceeded, the viceroy gradually built a new administrative structure. While institutions were created and discarded according to his changing needs, Muḥammad ʿAlī depended essentially upon the members of his own family, particularly Ibrāhīm, and loyal servants, such as his Armenian confidant Boghos Bey. Characteristic of his governmental system were councils of officials, convened to deliberate on public business, and administrative departments (divans) that bore some resemblance to the ministries of European governments. In local administration, Muḥammad ʿAlī established a highly centralized system with a clear chain of command from Cairo through the provincial governors, down to the village headmen. Initiative was not encouraged, but firm control had taken the place of anarchy.

These changes necessitated the training of officers and officials in the new Europeanized ways of working; and this in turn resulted in the creation of a range of educational institutions alongside the traditional Muslim schools that prepared the ʿulamāʾ. Much of the foundation work was done by expatriates, while missions of Egyptian students were sent to Europe, especially to Paris. One of these , missions was accompanied by Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ aṭal-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73), who served as its religious teacher and later played the leading part in inaugurating the translation of European works into Arabicand so . He thus was a pioneer both in the interpretation of European culture to Egypt and in the renaissance of literary Arabic. The establishment of a government printing press in 1815 soon made possible 1822 facilitated the wide dissemination of the new books.

ʿAbbās I and Saʿīd, 1848-63

The reign of ʿAbbās I (1848–54) indicates how precarious was the advance of westernization in Egypt. The effort had already been relaxed in the last decade of Muḥammad ʿAlīŢs ʿAlī’s rule, and ʿAbbās showed himself to be a traditionalist. It was typical of his policy that he closed the school of languages and the translation bureau and sent their director, aṭal-Ṭahṭāwī, to virtual exile in the Sudan. The French, who had played so large a part in Muḥammad ʿAlīŢs ʿAlī’s reforms, fell into disfavour, and for diplomatic support ʿAbbās turned to their British rivals, whose support help was needed against the Ottomans. Although initially ʿAbbās was ostentatiously loyal to the Sultansultan, he resented an attempt made at this that time to curtail his autonomy. The British, for their part, had managed to enhance their communications with India facilitated by the grant of by winning from ʿAbbās a concession to build a railway from Alexandria to Cairo; the line was completed between 1851 and 1856 and was extended to Suez two years later. Saʿīd (reigned 1854–63), who succeeded on ʿAbbās’ ʿAbbās’s mysterious and violent death, inaugurated another reversal of policy. While he lacked Muḥammad ʾAlī’s ʿAlī’s energy and ability, he was not unsympathetic to the westernizersWesternizers. To his French friend Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had been a friend to Muḥammad ʾAlī ʿAlī as well) he granted in 1854 a concession for the cutting of a canal across the isthmus of Suez. This embroiled him both with the Sultansultan, whose prerogative had been encroached upon, and the British, whose overland railway route was threatened by the project; a deadlock lasted throughout his reign.

Ismāʿīl, 1863–79

Ismāʿīl, the son of Ibrāhīm Pasha, who succeeded on the death of Saʿīd, displayed some of his grandfather’s dynamic energy and enthusiasm for modernization. He lacked caution, however, and his reign ended in catastrophe. From his predecessors he inherited a precarious economy and a burden of debt. The decline in North American cotton exports caused by the American Civil War (1861–65) produced a boom in greatly increased Britain’s demand for Egyptian long-staple cotton. This product had been introduced and developed in Muḥammad ʾAlī’s ʿAlī’s time, but its production had languished until the interruption of supplies of American cotton caused a fourfold increase in price during the war years. When peace returned, prices collapsed with disastrous consequences for the Egyptian economy. In the management of his finances, Ismāʿīl was both extravagant and unwise and laid himself open to unscrupulous exploitation. Ismāʿīl was committed to the Suez Canal project, but he modified the grant in two important respects: by withdrawing the cession of a strip of land from the Nile River to the Suez isthmus, along which a freshwater canal was to be constructed, and by refusing to provide unlimited (and largely unpaid) peasant labour for the project, a practice that had stirred great outcry in England and continental Europe. The matter was submitted to arbitration; an indemnity of more than £3,000,000 a large indemnity was imposed on Ismāʿīl, who also agreed to pay for a large block of shares put by de Lesseps to into Saʿīd’s account. French pressure on the Sultan sultan succeeded at last in overcoming resistance to the canal project at IstanbulConstantinople, and a firman(decree from the sultan) authorizing its construction was granted in March 1866. Work had in fact already been going on for seven years, and in November 1869 the Suez Canal was opened to shipping by the empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III of France. The incident symbolized the political and cultural orientation of Egypt in the middle decades of the 19th century.

Ismāʿīl, in other ways, presented himself as the ruler of a new and important state. Although his relations with his suzerain, Sultan Abdülaziz (reigned 1861–76), were normally friendly, he was no less anxious eager than his predecessors to secure the autonomy of his dynasty. In 1866 he obtained a firmanestablishing the succession by primogeniture in his own line—abandoning the contemporary Ottoman rule of succession by the eldest male. A year later a firmanconferred upon Ismāʿīl the special title of khedive, which had in fact been used unofficially since Muḥammad ʾAlī’s ʿAlī’s time and which distinguished the viceroy of Egypt from other Ottoman governors. A period of strained relations developed between the Khedive khedive and the Sultan sultan arising from Ismāʿīl’s implied pretensions to sovereignty at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but the two were later reconciled; a firmanreconfirmed the Khedive’s khedive’s privileges in 1873. These concessions by the Sultansultan, however, cost Ismāʿīl heavy expenditure and expenditure—in bribes to Ottoman officials in Constantinople—and an increase in the annual Egyptian tribute and formed were another factor in the growth of Ismāʿīl’s indebtedness.

Ismāʿīl had inherited an African empire in the northern area of the Sudan. Since the middle of the century, in consequence of the abolition of the monopolies, merchants had penetrated south and southwest, up the White Nile and the Baḥr alAl-Ghazāl rivers, in search of ivory. An ancillary slave trade that had developed that was repugnant to the European conscience. Humanitarian and expansionist motives thus coincided to persuade Ismāʿīl distressed Europeans, who forgot that their depredations against Africans had continued virtually unabated until the early 19th century, and they prevailed on the khedive to abolish this commerce. Thus, acting on humanitarian and expansionist motives, Ismāʿīl sought to extend Egyptian rule into these remoter regions. He made considerable use of expatriates, notably the Englishmen Sir Samuel White Baker and Sir Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon, who extended the Khedive’s khedive’s nominal authority to the African Great Lakes. Another series of events led to the conquest in 1874 of the sultanate of Darfur in the west. The Khedive khedive also wished to make Egypt the dominant power in the Red Sea region. The Sultan sultan granted him the old Ottoman ports of Suakin Sawākin and Mitsiwa in 1865. Egyptian control was established on the Somali coast, and in 1875 Harer the city of Hārer was captured. Attempts to invade Abyssinia in 1875 and 1876 were, however, unsuccessful and marked the limits of Ismāʿīl’s imperial expansion.

Like other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was bound by the Capitulations—a capitulations—a system of privileges derived from ancient earlier Western treaties with former sultans. Under the Capitulationscapitulations, European and American residents in Egypt were exempt from local taxation and were subject only to their own consular courts. By patient negotiations over several years, Nūbār PasaPasha, Ismāʿīl’s Armenian minister, succeeded in establishing the Mixed Courts in 1875. These had jurisdiction in civil cases involving Egyptians and foreigners, or foreigners of different nationalities, and had both foreign and Egyptian judges, who administered codes based on French law.

By this that time the social consequences of the agrarian and political changes inaugurated by Muḥammad ʾAlī ʿAlī were clearly appearing. The Khedive khedive and his family were the Egypt’s principal landholdersin Egypt, possessing extensive personal estates quite apart from the state lands. Around the khedivial family was a parvenu aristocracy that held the principal civil and military offices. Many of its members were also great landowners; most of them were Turkish or Circassian by origin. Although the peasantry’s condition of the peasantry had been adversely affected harmed by military conscription, by corvées for public works (including large-scale demands for labour on the railways and the Suez Canal), and by ill-considered economic and industrial experiments, the rights of cultivators on their land gradually increased. The richer peasants, from whom the village headmen were recruited, in particular increased in importance. When, in November 1866, Ismāʿīl set up the consultative council known as the Assembly of Delegates, the members of which were chosen by indirect election, the great majority of those chosen elected were village headmen. While Ismāʿīl did not intend that to give any of his powers to the Assemblyshould limit his power, its establishment and composition were indications of the political development of the Egyptians in pointed to the political growth that would occur among native Egyptians in the next 60 years. Conscription had affected the political significance makeup of the army. The ascendancy power of the entrenched Turco-Circassians was challenged by native Egyptian officers, who resented the privileged position privileges of their foreign colleagues. The defeat of the Circassian commander in chief, Rātib Pasha, by the Abyssinians in 1876 was a blow from which the prestige of the old officer group never recovered.

In From the Assemblyand , the army, and among the westernized intelligentsia , emerged politically conscious individuals and groups began to emerge who drew their ideas from both Western and Islāmic Islamic sources. Their organization was for the most part small-scale and ephemeral, and their outlook was subversive, being hostile to the autocracy of the Khedivekhedive, the ascendancy dominance of the Turco-Circassians, and the pervasive power of the Europeans.

Political tension increased in the last years of Ismāʿīl’s reign. Various expedients to postpone bankruptcy (e.g., the khedive’s sale in 1875 of his Suez Canal shares to Britain) had failed, and in 1876 the Caisse de la Dette Publique (Commission of the Public Debt) was established for the service of the Egyptian debt. Its members were nominated by France, Britain, Austria, and Italy. In the same year, Egyptian revenue and expenditure were placed under the supervision of a British and a French controller (the Dual Control). After an international enquiry in 1878, Ismāʿīl accepted the principle of ministerial responsibility for government and authorized the formation of an international ministry under Nūbār that included the British and French controllers in his cabinet. Ismāʿīl, however, was not prepared willing to yield give up his autocracytamely. In 1879 he profited from exploited an army demonstration against the European ministers to dismiss Nūbār, and he worked in alliance with the Assembly of Delegates to destroy international control over Egypt. By this time, however, his standing outside Egypt had been lost; and in June 1879, Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1908reigned 1876–1909), at the instigation of instigated by France and Britain, deposed him in favour of his son, Muḥammad Tawfīq.

Renewed European intervention, 1879–82

European domination was immediately reasserted. The Dual Control was revived, with Evelyn Baring serving as the British controllerbeing Evelyn Baring. By the Law of Liquidation (July 1880), the annual revenues were divided into two approximately equal portions, one of which was assigned to the Caisse de la Dette, the other to the Egyptian government. The Assembly of Delegates was dissolved. The forces of resistance that Ismāʿīl had stimulated were not, however, allayed by these means. There had already come into existence a nationalist group within the Assembly, prominent among whom was Muḥammad Sharīf(Cherif) Pasha, prime minister from April to August 1879. In the army a group of Egyptian officers, whose leader was Aḥmad ʿUrābī (Arabi)Pasha, was disaffected from the Khedive khedive and resentful of European control of Egypt. By 1881 these two groups had allied to form what was called the National Party , (al-Ḥizb al-Waṭanī.Open tension appeared with ).

Tension surfaced when a petition drawn up was presented in January 1881 by ʿUrābī and two of his colleagues against the war minister, ʿUthmān RifqīPasha, a Circassian. They were arrested and court-martialed but released were later set free by mutineers. Tawfīq capitulatedgave in, dismissed Rifqī, and appointed Bāİūdī Maḥmud Sāmī al-Bārūdī Pasha, one of ʿUrābī’s friendsallies, as war minister. But the ʿUrābists still felt themselves endangeredfeared reprisals; a military demonstration in Cairo in September 1881 compelled forced Tawfīq to appoint a new ministry under Sharīf and to convoke the convene a new Assembly. But the alliance between the military group officers and Sharīf was uneasy.

Meanwhile, the European powers were becoming increasingly alarmed. A joint English and French communication note sent in January 1882 with the intention of strengthening the Khedive khedive against his opponents had the contrary opposite effect. The Assembly of Delegates swung toward the ʿUrābists. Sharīf resigned and al-Bārūdī became prime minister premier with ʿUrābī as war minister. Rioting ensued on June 11 after British and French naval forces had been sent to Alexandria. From this point Britain took the initiative. The French refused participation to join in a bombardment of Alexandria (July 11), while an international conference held at Istanbul Constantinople was boycotted by the Turks Ottomans and produced no solution of the problem. The British government finally resolved on intervention to intervene, having secured Tawfīq’s support, and sent an expeditionary force under Sir Garnet Wolseley to the Suez Canal. The ʿUrābists were rapidly soundly defeated at Tall al-Kabīr (Sept. 13, 1882), and Cairo was occupied the next day.

The period of British domination (1882–1952)

The British occupation and the Protectorate (1882–1922)

The British occupation marked the culmination of developments that had been at work since 1798: the de facto separation of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, the attempt of European powers to influence or control the country, and the rivalry of France and Britain for ascendancy in the country. Through Because of the last-minute withdrawal of the French, the British had secured the sole domination of Egypt. W.E. Gladstone’s Liberal William Ewart Gladstone’s liberal government was, however, reluctant to prolong the occupation or to establish formal political control, which it feared would antagonize both the Sultan sultan and the other European powers; but the British were unwilling to evacuate Egypt without securing their strategic interests, and this never seemed possible without maintaining a military presence there.

An incident at the outset of the occupation was significant a sign of future tensions. On British insistence, the Khedive’s khedive’s government was obliged to place ʿUrābī and his associates on public trial and then to commute the resulting death sentences to exile. Tawfīq’s prestige, slight enough at his accession, and diminished in the three years before the occupation, was still further undermined by this intervention of the British government. Meanwhile, Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador in IstanbulConstantinople, visited Egypt and prepared a report on measures to be taken for the reconstruction of the administrative system. The projects of reform that he envisaged would necessitate an indefinite continuation of the occupation. The implications of this for British policy were slowly and reluctantly accepted by the ministry in London, under pressure from its representative in Cairo, the British agent and consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring, who in 1891 1892 became Lord Cromer.

Two principal problems confronted the occupying power: first, the acquisition of some degree of international recognition for its special but ambiguous position in Egypt; , second, a definition of its relationship to the khedivial government, which formed the official administration of the country. The main European opponents of recognition of the British position were the French, who resented the abolition of the Dual Control (December 1882). The Caisse de la Dette remained in existencecontinued to exist, and until 1904 the British had to tread warily in order to circumvent set their policies to deal with French opposition in this institution. In the early years of the occupation, when Egyptian finances were in disarray, French hostility was a serious problemposed an obstacle, but from 1889 onward there was a budget surplus and consequently greater freedom of action for the Egyptian government. A moderate degree of international agreement over Egypt was attained by the Convention of London (1885), which secured an international loan for the Egyptian government and added two further members (nominated by Germany and Russia) to the Caisse de la Dette. In 1888 the Convention of Constantinople (Istanbul) provided that the Suez Canal should always be open to ships of all countries, in war and peace alike. This was, however, a statement of principle rather than fact; without British cooperation it remained a dead letter.

In matters concerning the Egypt’s international statusof Egypt, the decisions were taken made in London, but where the internal administration of the country was concerned, Cromer’s opinions were usually conclusiveCromer usually set the policies. Although throughout the occupation the facade of khedivial government was retained, British advisers attached to the various ministries were more influential than their ministers, while Cromer himself steadily increased his control over the whole administrative machine.

Tawfīq himself gave little trouble, but his prime ministers were more tenacious. SharīfPasha, prime minister premier at the beginning of the occupation until 1884, and his successorsNubar , Nūbār Pasha (1884–88) and Muṣṭafa Riyāḍ (Riaz) Pasha (1888–91), resigned because of clashes over administrative control. Thereafter, From then until November 1908, with a break in 1893–95, the prime minister was Muṣṭafā Fahmī Pasha, who showed himself an proved to be Cromer’s obedient instrumentof Cromer.

ʿAbbās Ḥilmī II, 1892–1914

The death of Tawfīq and the accession of his 17-year-old son, ʿAbbās II (ḤilmīII), in 1892 marked the beginning of opened a new phase of opposition to the occupation. The new khedive was would not content submit to accept Cromer’s tutelage, while the British agent resented the attempts of one so much his junior to play a serious role in Egyptian politics. ʿAbbās dismissed Muṣṭafā Fahmī in January 1893 and tried to appoint his own nominee as prime minister. Cromer, backed by the British government, frustrated his these endeavours, and Fahmī eventually returned to officein November 1895. ʿAbbās provoked another crisis in January 1894 by public criticism of publicly criticizing British military officersand especially H.H. , especially Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the sirdar (commander in chief). Once again Cromer intervened, stepped in and forced ʿAbbās was compelled to make amendsa public apology.

Other considerations apart, the behaviour of ʿAbbās in the early years of his reign indicated the emergence of a new generation who had only been children when the occupation began. One of ʿAbbās’ ʿAbbās’s contemporaries was Muṣṭafā Kāmil (1874–1908), who had studied in France and then had entered a circle of Anglophobe come to know a group of writers and politicians opposed to the British occupation. On returning to Egypt in 1894, he had reached an understanding with the Khedive khedive on the basis of their common detestation of opposition to the British occupation. By his speeches and writings (in 1900 he founded his own newspaper, al-Liwā), he endeavoured to create an Egyptian patriotism that would rally the entire nation around the Khedivekhedive. A boost was given to nationalism by the campaigns for the reconquest of the Sudan (1896–98)and still more by the Condominium Agreement of 1899—to which Egypt provided most of the money and troops, although the commanding officers were British—and by the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreements, which nominally gave Egypt and Britain joint responsibility for the administration of the reconquered territory but in effect made the Sudan a British possession.

A final episode in the reconquest of the Sudan, the confrontation of British and French at Fashoda on the White Nile in 1898 (the Fashoda Incident), was followed by the reconciliation of the two powers in the Entente Cordiale (1904), whichin effect , inter alia, gave Britain a free hand in Egypt. This was a blow to deflated the hopes of Muṣṭafā Kāmil and to his alliance with the Khedivekhedive, who showed himself became more willing to cooperate with Cromer. Muṣṭafā Kāmil now turned to Sultan Abdülhamid. When a dispute (the Tābah Incident, 1906) arose between the Ottomans and the occupying power over the Sinai Peninsula, Muṣṭafā Kāmil sought to rally Egyptian nationalist opinion in favour of the Sultansultan, but Muṣṭafā Kāmil died in 1908some Egyptians accused him of harming their national interest in order to favour Islamic unity.

British domination in Egypt and Cromer’s personal ascendancy never seemed more secure than in the period following the Entente Cordiale. But the “veiled protectorate” had hidden weaknesses. Cromer was both out of touch and out of sympathy with the new generation of Egyptians. The occupation had become to all intents and purposes permanent, and the consequent growth of the British official establishment created frustration among frustrated educated Egyptians, who sought government posts for themselves and their sons. The British, however, saw themselves as the benefactors of the Egyptian peasantry, whom they had delivered from the corvée and the lash. The Dinshawāy Incident showed them in another light. In June 1906 a fracas between villagers at Dinshawāy and a party of British officers out pigeon shooting resulted in the death of a British officer. The special tribunal set up to try the matter imposed exemplary and brutal sentences on the villagers. In the bitter aftermath of this affair, which strengthened Muṣṭafā Kāmil’s nationalists, Cromer retired in May 1907.

Sir John Eldon Gorst, who succeeded Cromer, had served in Egypt from 1886 to 1904 and brought a fresh mind to bear on the problems of the occupation. He obtained reached an understanding with the Khedive khedive and endeavoured sought to diminish the growing power and numbers of the British establishment. At the same time, he tried to give more effective authority to Egyptian political institutions. Muṣṭafā Fahmī’s long premiership ended, and he was followed by a Copt, Buṭrus GhālīPasha. When Gorst died prematurely in July 1911, he had attained only limited success. Many British officials resented his policies, which at the same time failed to conciliate the nationalists. A project for the extension of the Muṣṭafa Kāmil had died in 1908 and had been succeeded by Muḥammad Farīd, who led the National Party toward greater extremism in its opposition to the British. A project to extend the Suez Canal Company’s 99-year concession by 40 years was thrown out by the General Assembly (a quasi-parliamentary body, set up in 1883), while Buṭrus Ghālī, who had advocated it, was assassinated a few days later by a Muslim extremistnationalist. The appointment of Lord Kitchener to succeed Gorst portended the end of conciliation of the Khedivekhedive. But Kitchener, although autocratic, was not wholly conservative; his attempts to limit the power and influence of ʿAbbās Ḥilmī served the interests of the nationalistsmoderate Egyptians who did not belong to the National Party. The Organic Law of 1913 created a new and more powerful Legislative Assembly that served as a training ground for the nationalist leaders of the postwar period. At the same time, the peasants were helped by improved agriculture irrigation and by legal protection of their holdings landholdings from seizure for debt.

World War I and independence

In November 1914 Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire and in December proclaimed a protectorate over Egypt, deposed ʿAbbās, and appointed his uncle, Ḥusayn Kāmil, with the title of sultan. Kitchener was succeeded by Sir Henry MacMahonMcMahon, and he by Sir Reginald Wingate, both with the title of high commissioner. Although Egypt was did not required have to provide troops, the people, and particularly especially the peasantry, suffered from the effects of war. The declaration of martial law and the suspension of the Legislative Assembly curbed the activities of middle-class temporarily silenced the nationalists. Ḥusayn Kāmil died in October 1917 and was succeeded by his ambitious brother, Aḥmad Fuʾād.

On Nov. 13, 1918, two days after the Armistice, Wingate was visited by three Egyptian politicians headed by Saʿd ZaghlūlPasha. Zaghlūl , who demanded autonomy for Egypt and announced his intention of leading a delegation (Arabic wafd) to state his case in England. The British government’s refusal to accept a delegation, followed by the arrest of Zaghlūl, produced a widespread revolt in Egypt; and Sir Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby (later Lord Allenby), the victor over the Turks Ottomans in Palestine, was sent out as special high commissioner. Allenby insisted on concessions to the nationalistsin the hopes of reaching , hoping to reach a settlement. Zaghlūl was released , and subsequently led his delegation to the Wafd, now Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), where it was denied a hearing to plead for Egypt’s independence. The Wafd, in the meanwhile, had become a countrywide organization , that dominated Egyptian politics. The Milner Commission (1919–20), sent to report on the establishment of constitutional government under the protectorate, was boycotted, but Milner subsequently Lord Alfred Milner, who headed the commission, later had private talks with Zaghlūl in London. Finally, hoping to outmaneuver Zaghlūl and to build up a group of pro-British politicians in Egypt, Allenby pressed his government to promise independence without previously securing British interests by a treaty. The declaration of independence (Feb. 28, 1922) ended the protectorate but, pending negotiations, reserved four matters to the British government’s discretionof the British government: the security of imperial communications, defense, the protection of foreign interests and of minorities, and the Sudan. On March 15 the Sultan sultan became King Fuʾād I (reigned 1922–36) of Egypt.

The Kingdom of Egypt (1922–52)

The new kingdom was in form a constitutional monarchy. The constitution, based on that of Belgium and promulgated in April 1923, defined the King’s king’s executive powers and established a bicameral legislature. An electoral law provided for universal male suffrage and the indirect election of deputies to the lower house: Assembly; the Senate was half elected and half appointed. But Egyptian constitutionalism was proved as illusory as Egyptian independence. A political struggle was continually waged among three opportunist contestants—the Kingking, the Wafd, and the British.

The interwar period

Fuʾād was never popular and Never popular, Fuʾād felt insecure , and was therefore prepared to intrigue with the nationalists or with the British to secure his position and powers. The Wafd, with its mass following, elaborate organization, and (until his death in 1927) charismatic leader in Zaghlūl, was the Egypt’s only truly national partyin Egypt. Ideologically, it stood for national independence against British domination and for constitutional government against royal autocracy. In practice—and increasingly as time went on—its leaders were prepared to make deals with the British or the King king to obtain or retain power. Personal and political rivalries led to the formation of splinter parties, the first of which, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, broke off as early as 1922. The primary aim of the British government, represented by its high commissioner (after 1936, its ambassador), was to secure imperial interests, especially the control of communications through the Suez Canal. The need for a treaty to safeguard these interests led Britain on more than one occasion to conciliate nationalist feeling by supporting the Wafd against the Kingking.

The first general election, in January 1924, gave the Wafd a majority, and Zaghlūl became prime minister for a few months marked by unsuccessful treaty discussions with the British and tension with the Kingking. When in November 1924 Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo, Allenby immediately presented an ultimatum that, though later modified by the British government, caused Zaghlūl to resign. The general election of March 1925 left the Wafd still the strongest party, but the Parliament parliament no sooner met than it was dissolved. For more than a year Egypt was governed by decree. The third general election, in May 1926, again gave the Wafd a majority. The British frowned on opposed a return of Zaghlūl to the premiership, and the office went instead to the Liberal Constitutionalist ʿAdlī Yegen ( Yakan), while Zaghlūl held the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies until his death in 1927. Once again, tension developed between the Parliament parliament and the Kingking, and in April 1927 ʿAdlī resigned, to be succeeded by another Liberal Constitutionalist, ʿAbd al-Khāliq Tharwat (Sarwat) Pasha, who negotiated a draft treaty with the British foreign secretary. The draft treaty, however, failed to win the approval of the Wafd. Tharwat resigned (in March 1928), and Muṣṭafā anal-Naḥḥās (Nahas) Pasha, Zaghlūl’s successor as head of the Wafd, became prime minister. But the King king dismissed him in June and dissolved the Parliament parliament in July. In effect, the constitution was suspended, and Egypt was again governed by decree under a Liberal Constitutionalist premier, Muḥammad Maḥmūd Pasha.

Draft treaty proposals were agreed upon in June 1929, but since Maḥmūd was unable to because Maḥmūd could not overcome Wafdist opposition, British influence was thrown behind Britain pressed for a return to constitutional government, hoping that a freely elected Parliament parliament would approve the proposals. In the fourth general election (December 1929), the Wafd won a majority, and anal-Naḥḥās again became prime ministerpremier. Resumed treaty Treaty negotiations resumed but broke down over the problem issue of the Sudan, from which the Egyptians had been virtually excluded since 1924. AnAl-Naḥḥās also clashed with the Kingking, whose influence he sought to curtail. He resigned in June 1930, and Fuʾād appointed Ismāʿīl Ṣidqī (Sidki) Pasha to the premiership. The constitution of 1923 was abrogated, and replaced by another was promulgated by royal decree. This, with its accompanying electoral law, strengthened the King’s king’s power. By this and other measures, Ṣidqī sought to break the power of the Wafd, which boycotted the general election of June 1931. The strong government of Ṣidqī lasted until September 1933, when he was dismissed by the King. Thereafter, for more than a year, the king dismissed him. For the next two years palace-appointed governments ruled Egypt.

But Fuʾād, whose health was failing, could not hold out indefinitely against the internal pressure of the Wafd and the external pressure of Britain, which was becoming increasingly anxious for wanted a treaty with Egypt negotiated specifically through the Wafd. In April 1935 1936 the constitution of 1923 was restored, and a general election in May 1936 gave the Wafd a majority once more. Fuʾād had died in the previous month and was succeeded by his son Farouk Fārūq I (Fārūqreigned 1936–52), who was still a minor when he ascended the throne. AnAl-Naḥḥās became prime minister for the third time. Agreement was quickly reached with Britain, and a treaty of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, a document calling for mutual defense and alliance between the two countries, was signed in August 1936. At the conference of in Montreux, Switz., held in the following year, Egypt, with the backing of backed by Britain, obtained the immediate abolition of the Capitulations capitulations and the extinction of the Mixed Courts after 12 years. In Also in 1937also, Egypt became a member of the League of Nations.

AnAl-Naḥḥās had reached the height of his power, but he was soon to be overthrownonly briefly. In July 1937 the young king Farouk Fārūq came of age and assumed his full royal powers. He was both popular and ambitious Popular, with ambitions to rule, and tension rapidly developed between him and Fārūq soon turned against his prime minister. A split developed in the Wafd: Maḥmūd Fahmī anal-Nuqrāshī (Nokrashy) Pasha and Aḥmad Māhir (Maher) Pasha were expelled and formed the Saʿdist GroupParty. The Wafdist youth movement, known as the Blueshirts, was opposed by fought with the Greenshirts of Young Egypt, a fascist an ultranationalist organization. In December 1937 King Farouk Fārūq dismissed anal-Naḥḥās. In the ensuing general election (April 1938), the Wafd won only 12 seats.

World War II and its aftermath

Although at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 Egypt provided facilities for the British war effort during World War II (1939–45) in accordance with the 1936 treaty, few Egyptians were enthusiastic supporters of backed Britain and many expected its defeat. In 1940 the British brought pressure on the King king to dismiss his prime minister, ʿAlī Māhir, and to appoint a more cooperative government. When, early in 1942, German forces prepared threatened to invade Egypt, a second British intervention compelled King Farouk intervention—often termed the 4 February Incident—compelled King Fārūq to accept anal-Naḥḥās as his prime minister. The Wafd, its power confirmed by overwhelming success in the general election of March 1942, cooperated with Britain. Nevertheless, the Britain’s February intervention of February 1942 had disastrous consequences. It confirmed Farouk’s Fārūq’s hostility to both the British and anal-Naḥḥās and tarnished the Wafd’s pretensions as the standard-bearer of Egyptian nationalism. The Wafd was damaged weakened also by internal rivalries and allegations of corruption.

AnAl-Naḥḥās was dismissed by the King king in October 1944. His successor, Aḥmad Māhir, was acceptable to the British, but he was assassinated in February 1945, at the moment of Egypt’s declaration of Egypt declared war on Germany and Japan. He was succeeded by a fellow Saʿdist, anal-NuqrāshīPasha.

At the end of World War II, Egypt was in a thoroughly unstable condition. The Wafd declined and its political opponents took up the nationalist demand for a revision of the treaty of 1936—in particular for the complete evacuation of British troops from Egypt and the ending of British control in the Sudan. Politics was passing into the hands of radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, developed from an orthodox Islāmic a mainstream Islamic reformist movement into a militant mass organization. Demonstrations in Cairo became increasingly frequent and violent. The pressure rendered it impossible for prevented any Egyptian government to attempt a settlement of from settling its two main external problems: the need to revise the treaty with Britain, and the wish to support back the Arab cause Arabs in Palestine. Negotiations with Britain, undertaken by anal-Nuqrāshī and (after February 1946) by his successor, Ṣidqī, broke down over the British refusal to prejudice the possible independence of rule out eventual independence for the Sudan. Although Egypt referred the dispute to the United Nations (UN) in July 1947 , the deadlock continuedbut failed to win its case.

Until the interwar period neither the Egyptian public nor the politicians had shown much interest in Arab affairs generally; Egyptian nationalism had developed as an indigenous response to local conditions. After 1936, however, Egypt became involved in the Palestine problem, and in 1943–44 it played a leading part in the formation of the Arab League, which opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. After World War II, Egypt became increasingly committed to the Arab cause in Palestine, but its unexpected and crushing defeat in the first Arab–Israeli War Arab-Israeli war (1948–49), which had been launched with Syria, Iraq, and Jordan in response to the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, contributed to disillusionment and political instability. The Muslim Brotherhood increased stepped up its terrorist violent activities. AnAl-Nuqrāshī, again prime minister, endeavoured tried to suppress the organization and was assassinated in December 1948. The Brotherhood’s leader, Ḥasan al-Bannāʾ, was murdered two months later.

A The Wafd won the general election in January 1950gave the Wafd a majority, and anal-Naḥḥās again formed a government. Failing to reach agreement with Britain, in October 1951 he abrogated both the 1936 treaty and the Condominium Agreement of 1899. Anti-British demonstrations were followed by guerrilla warfare against the British Britain’s garrison in the Canal Zonecanal zone. British military action reprisals in Ismailia was followed led to the burning of Cairo on Jan. 26, 1952, by the burning of Cairo by demonstrators. An. Al-Naḥḥās was dismissed, and there were four prime ministers in the ensuing six months.

The revolution and the Republic

The Nasser regime

At mid-century Egypt was ripe for revolution. Political groupings of both right and left pressed for radical alternatives. From an array of contenders for power, it was a movement of military conspirators—the Free Officers led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser—that toppled the monarchy in a coup in on July 23, 1952. In broad outline, the history of contemporary Egypt is the story of this coup, which preempted a revolution but then itself became turned into a revolution from above. For three more than five decades, rule by Free Officers brought just enough advance progress at home and enhancement of standing abroad to make Egypt an island of stability in a turbulent Middle East.

The 1952 coup of July 1952 was fueled by a powerful but vague Egyptian nationalism rather than by a coherent ideology. It yielded produced a regime whose initially reformist character was given more precise form by a domestic power struggle and by the necessity of coming to terms with the British, who still occupied their Suez Canal baseat Suez.

The domestic challenge to Nasser came in February–April 1954 from Maj. Gen. Mohammad Muḥammad Naguib, an older officer who served as figurehead for the Free Officers and had been president since June 1953, when Egypt officially became a republic. Political parties had been abolished in January 1953of that year. To supplement his power base in the military forces, Nasser drew on the police and on working-class support mobilized by the newly created mass political organization called the National Unionsome of the trade unions. The small middle class, the former political parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood all rallied to Naguib. In the end, Naguib was placed under house arrest, and Nasser assumed the premiership. Nasser’s triumph meant that a strong reliance on the the government would thereafter rely on its military and security apparatus , coupled with carefully controlled manipulation of the civilian population, would be basic to the new system of rule.

Obscured in the West was Nasser’s initial moderation regarding Egypt’s key foreign policy challenges—the Sudan, the British presence, and Israel. An agreement signed in 1954 February 1953 established a transitional period of self-government for the Sudan, which became an independent republic in January 1956. Prolonged negotiations yielded led to the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1954Agreement, under which British troops were to be evacuated gradually from the Canal Zonecanal zone. Some Egyptians were critical, finding criticized the treaty unsatisfactory from an Egyptian a nationalist perspective, fearing that external events could permit the British to reoccupy the canal bases.

An attempt to assassinate Nasser by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in October 1954 was used as a pretext to crush that organization. A number of its members were executed and hundreds were imprisoned under brutal conditions. In the decades to come, these incarcerations were to bear bitter fruit as a generation of Brotherhood militants became hardened and drew new conclusions about the nature of the state in Egypt. One of them, a formerly secularist writer and scholar named Sayyid Quṭb who had come late to the Brotherhood, drew upon his prison experience to draft a template for modern Islamic holy war that was afterward embraced by a large number of Egypt’s Muslim militants.

In retrospect, it is clear that Nasser was the a reluctant champion of the Arab struggle against Israel. Domestic development was his priority. A dangerous pattern of violent interactions, however, was evolving that would eventually draw drew the Egyptians into renewed conflict with Israel. Small groups of Palestinian raiders (fedayeen), including some operating from Egyptian-controlled Gaza, were infiltrating Israel’s borders. In October 1953 Early in 1955 the Israeli government initiated the began its policy of large-scale retaliationthat it pursued thereafter. One such strike—an attack on Gaza in February 1955 that left killed 38 Egyptians dead—exposed Egyptians—exposed the military weakness of the Free Officer regime, which tried, but failed, to buy weapons from Western countries.

In September 1955 Nasser announced that an arms agreement had been signed between Egypt and Czechoslovakia (acting for the Soviet Union). The way to improved Soviet–Egyptian Soviet-Egyptian relations had been prepared by Nasser’s refusal to join the Baghdad Pact (the Middle East Treaty Organization, later known as the Central Treaty Organization), which had been formed earlier that year by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, with the support of the United States, to counter the threat of Soviet expansion in the Middle East. With the 1955 arms agreement of 1955deal, the Soviet Union eluded efforts to contain its actions and established itself as a force in the Middle Eastregion.

The erosion of Nasser’s initially pro-Western orientation was accelerated further by the denial of funds previously promised by the hastened when the United States and Britain refused to give Egypt funds they had previously promised for the construction of a high dam at Aswānthe Aswān High Dam. Defiantly, Nasser announced nationalized the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in July 1956 in order to use its proceeds to finance the dam. In its subsequent attack on Egypt in October 1956, Israel was joined by the British, who were enraged by the nationalization, and the French, who were angered by Egyptian aid to the revolt in AlgeriaBritain and France, major shareholders in the company, were angered by Nasser’s actions (France was equally infuriated by Egyptian aid to the Algerians who were revolting against French rule) and sought to regain control of the canal by an intricate ruse. In collaboration with France and Britain, Israel, which continued to suffer raids by Egyptian-supported guerrillas, attacked Egypt in October. The two European powers then brought in their own troops, claiming to be enforcing a UN peace resolution, and reoccupied the canal zone. Pressure on the invading powers by the United States and the Soviet Union, however, soon ended the so-called Suez WarCrisis, leaving Nassertriumphant (, despite his military losses) and with the Suez Canal firmly in Egyptian hands, in control of the canal. The following year, Egypt agreed to the placement of a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) in the Sinai Peninsula to act as a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces.

Nasser, who, as the sole candidate, had been elected president in June 1956, pursued a more radical line in the ensuing decadefollowing the Suez War. He created the National Union as an instrument of mobilizing the people and launched an ambitious program of domestic transformation, a revolution from above that was paralleled by a drive for Egyptian leadership in the Arab world. Early in 1958 Egypt combined with Syria to form the United Arab Republic (U.A.R.), but it was a reluctant marriage of convenience and Egyptian dominance antagonized many Syrians, and the union was dissolved in bitterness in September 1961 (Egypt retained the name United Arab Republic until 1971). The secession of Syria was blamed by Nasser Nasser blamed the secession on Syrian “reactionariesreactionaries, ” and in direct response he pushed the his revolution in Egypt further to the left. The following spring a National Charter proclaimed that Egypt’s would regime to be a regime of “scientific socialism” one of scientific socialism, with a new mass organization, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), to function in place of replacing the National Union. Impressive Most large manufacturing firms, banks, transport services, and insurance companies were nationalized or sequestered.

Egypt made dramatic domestic gainswere registered. In 1950 industry manufacturing contributed 10 percent to the total national output; by 1970 that figure had increased to 21 percent. Unfortunatelydoubled. However, these achievements in industry were not matched in agriculture, and they were further undercut by Egypt’s rapid population growth. In a landmark move toward agricultural reform, Nasser enacted a policy in 1952 that limited land ownership to 200 feddans (208 acres [84 hectares]) per person.

Throughout this period the potential military danger from Israel was a constant factor in the calculations of the U.A.R. government. It was a motive in strengthening worked to strengthen ties with the Soviet bloc and producing a series of initiatives for to promote cooperation among the Arab states, which, however, were disappointingeven though such attempts usually failed. Nasser masked essential Egyptian moderation on the Israeli issue with a militant rhetoric of confrontation that was necessary in order to preserve his standing in the Arab world.

The failure of the union with Syria had been a blow to Nasser’s pan-Arab standingpolicy. To regain the initiative, Nasser intervened in 1962–67 on the republican side of the Yemeni in Yemen’s civil war. That intervention provoked This action led the U.A.R. into conflict with Saudi Arabia, which supported the Yemeni royalists, and with the United States, which in turn supported backed the Saudis. Until then, Nasser had managed to obtain impressive substantial aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Because of Egyptian intervention in the YemenOwing to congressional opposition to Nasser’s policies, U.S. aid was cut off in the mid-1960s1966.

This series of reversals was one key factor in the mood of desperation that pushed Nasser figured prominently in Nasser’s decision to abandon his policy of “militant inaction” toward Israel. For 10 years, relative peace on the border with Israel was had been maintained precariously maintained by the presence of a UN Emergency Force (the UNEF ) stationed on the Egyptian side. In the Arab summit conferences of the early 1960s 1964 and 1965, Nasser had counseled restraint, but in 1966 events eluded his control. Palestinian incursions against Israel were launched with greater frequency and intensity from bases in Jordan, Lebanon, and, especially, Syria. A radical Syrian regime openly pledged support to the Palestinian guerrilla raids. On Nov. 13, 1966, an Israeli strike into Jordan left 18 dead and 54 wounded. Taunted openly for hiding behind the UNEF, Nasser was forced felt he had to act. The Egyptian president requested the UNEF’s withdrawal of the UNEF from the Sinai border. But that would includeincluded, as the United Nations UN Secretary-General U Thant interpreted the order, the removal of removing UN troops stationed at Sharm ashal-Shaykh at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. The posting of Egyptian troops there would mean the closing of the proceeded to close the gulf to the IsraelisIsraeli shipping.

Israel had made it clear that blockading the closing of the gulf would be a cause for war. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched what it called a preemptive attack on Egyptand Jordan later , Jordan, and Syria, which led to a short conflict that came to be known as the June (or Six-Day (or June) War. All of Israel’s victory over Egypt and its allies was rapid and overwhelming. Within the first hours of the war, all of Egypt’s airfields were struck, and the bulk of most Egyptian planes were demolished on the ground. In the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian forces were defeated and put to flight. An estimated 10,000 Egyptians died. The , and the Israelis reached the Suez Canal on June 9. Egypt was crushed and Nasser resigned. A 8. During the war, Israel occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula (along with territories belonging to the other Arab belligerents), and the Suez Canal was closed to traffic. Instead, the waterway became a fortified ditch between the two warring sides.

Egypt was crushed by the loss, all the more because the government media had painted a rosy but misleading picture of Egyptian operations during the opening days of the war. Nasser, humiliated, resigned, but there was a popular outpouring of support, only partially manipulated by the government, refused the President’s resignation. But for him to remain in office. Regardless, the Nasser era was, in fact, over. Egypt rearmed rapidly and a low-level conflict, later known as the War of Attrition, soon began along the canal with the Israeli army (particularly its air force). In both domestic and foreign affairs, however, Nasser began a turn to the right that his successor, Anwar el-Sādāt, was to accelerate sharply.

The Sādāt regime

Nasser died on Sept. 28, 1970, and was succeeded by his vice president, Sādāt, himself a Free Officer. Although regarded at the time then viewed as an interim figure, Sādāt soon revealed unexpected gifts for political survival. In May 1971 he outmaneuvered a formidable combination of rivals for power, calling his victory the “Corrective Revolution.” Sādāt then used his strengthened position to manage launch a war with Israel in October 1973, thereby setting the stage for a new era in Egypt’s history.

The Sādāt era really began with the October (or Yom Kippur) War of 1973. The concerted Syrian–Egyptian surprise Syrian-Egyptian attack on October 6 surprised not only Israel but also the world. There were should have come as no surprise, given the continuing tensions along the canal zone (although the War of Attrition had ended shortly before Nasser’s death), but the Arab attack caught Israel completely off guard. Egypt held no illusions that Israel could be vanquished. Rather, the war was launched with the diplomatic aim of convincing a chastened, if still undefeated, Israel to negotiate on terms more favourable to the Arabs. Preparation for the war involved a loosening of ties with the Soviet Union; to that end, included Sādāt’s announcement in July 1972 Sādāt had announced the withdrawal of that nearly all Soviet military advisers who, it was claimed later, had opposed the Egyptian determination to fightwould leave Egypt—partly because the Soviets had refused to sell offensive weapons to the Arab countries.

Egypt did not win the war of 1973 in any military sense. As soon as Israel recovered from the initial shock of Arab gains in the first few days of fighting—and once the United States abandoned its early equivocation neutrality and resupplied Israel with a massive airlift—the Israelis demonstrated their military superiorityairlift of military supplies—the Israelis drove the Egyptians and Syrians back. A cease-fire was secured by the United States while Egyptian troops remained east of the Suez Canal and Israeli forces had crossed over to its western side.

Still, the initial successes in October 1973 were sufficient to allow enabled Sādāt to pronounce the war an Egyptian victory and to openly and honourably seek an honourable peace. Egyptian interests, as Sādāt saw them, dictated peace with Israel. Despite almost immediate difficulties friction with his Syrian allies, Sādāt signed the Sinai I (1974) and Sinai II (1975) disengagement agreements that returned the western Sinai and secured large foreign assistance commitments to Egypt. When Israeli inflexibility combined with Arab resistance to slow events, Sādāt made his a dramatic journey to Jerusalem on Nov. 19, 1977, to address the Israeli Knesset (Parliamentparliament). The subsequent Tortuous negotiations between Egypt and Israel ensued. The climactic meeting in September 1978 of Sādāt, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter at Camp David , Md., led directly to the Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty of in Maryland produced a pair of agreements known as the Camp David Accords. Both Sādāt and Begin were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace for these negotiations, and on March 26, 1979, the two leaders formally signed the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The treaty agreement provided for Egyptian–Israeli normalization and established peace between Egypt and Israel and set up a framework for resolving the complex Palestinian issue. Its provisions included the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces and civilians from Sinai within three years, the establishment of special security arrangements in Sinai, on the peninsula, the creation of a buffer zone along the Sinai–Israel Sinai-Israel border to be manned patrolled by United Nations UN peacekeeping forces, the exchange of ambassadors, and the establishment normalization of normal economic and cultural relations between the two countries, including the exchange of ambassadors. The status of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza territories and the question issue of Palestinian autonomy were to be negotiated.

Sādāt linked his peace initiative to the task of economic reconstruction, and proclaimed an open-door policy was proclaimed. A (Arabic: infitāḥ), hoping that a liberalized Egyptian economy would be revitalized by the inflow of Western and Arab capital. The peace process did produce economic benefits, notably a vast U.S. aid program, begun in 1975, that reached more than $1,000,000,000 a year by the 1980sexceeded $1 billion annually by 1981.

The Sādāt peace with Israel was not without its costs, however. As the narrowness of the Israeli interpretation of Palestinian autonomy under the Camp David agreement became clear, Sādāt found it impossible to could not convince the Arab world that the accords dealt justly with would ensure legitimate Palestinian rights. Egypt lost the financial support of the Arab states and, shortly after signing the peace treaty, was expelled from the Arab League.

At home, a new constitution promulgated in 1971 significantly increased the power of individual citizens to participate in the political process, and by 1976 laws were instituted permitting the creation of political parties. But democratization of political life did not prove to be an acceptable substitute for economic revitalization. On Jan. 18–19, 1977, demonstrations provoked by economic hardship broke out in Egypt’s major cities. An estimated 79 persons Nearly 100 people were killed, 1,000 were wounded, and 1,250 were and several thousand were either injured or jailed. The removal of the most oppressive features of Nasser’s rule, the return in controlled form to a multiparty system, and (at least initially) the Sādāt peace with Israel were all welcomed. But, as Egypt entered the 1980s, the lack of progress on failure to resolve the Palestinian issue and the failure to relieve mass economic hardships, heightened by the widening class gaps, threatened to destabilize the Sādāt regime. In the West, Sādāt’s international role initially obscured these danger signs. Then, undermined Sādāt legitimacy. The West failed to notice this until, in September 1981, his arrest of more than Sādāt arrested some 1,300 500 of the Egypt’s political eliteof Egypt signaled the precariousness of his position..

Perhaps more ominous during the 1970s were the signs of rising Muslim extremism throughout the country. Under Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood had been firmly squelched. Sayyid Quṭb had been executed in 1966 for treason, but large numbers of Muslim activists—many of them radicalized by imprisonment and by Quṭb’s writings on jihad and the apostasy of modern Muslim culture—went underground. Under Sādāt, groups of Muslim activists were given wide latitude to proselytize, particularly on Egypt’s university campuses, where it was hoped that they would counter lingering left-wing and Nasserite sentiment among the students, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood were released from prison and allowed to operate with relative freedom. Yet during that time there was a growing rise in religious violence, particularly directed against the country’s Coptic community but also, with growing frequency, against the government. The group al-Takfīr wa al-Hijrah (roughly, “Identification of Unbelief and Flight from Evil”—founded in 1967 after Quṭb’s execution) engaged in several terrorist attacks during the decade, and other groups, namely Islamic Jihad (al-Jihād al-Islāmī) and the Islamic Group (al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmiyah), formed with the goal of overthrowing Egypt’s secular state.

Egypt after Sādāt

Sādāt’s assassination on Oct. 6, 1981, by members of the radical fringe of the Muslim religious opposition militant soldiers associated with Islamic Jihad was greeted in Egypt by uprisings in some areas but mostly by a deafening calm. It was with a profound sense of relief that Egyptians brought Hosni MubarakHosnī (Ḥusnī) Mubārak, Sādāt’s handpicked vice president, to power, with a mandate for cautious change. As an air force general and hero of the October Yom Kippur War, Mubarak had played an important role in Sādāt’s rule from the early 1970sMubārak had worked closely with Sādāt since 1973.

During his first year as president, Mubarak Mubārak struck a moderate note. There was no , neither backing away from the peace with Israel and no nor loosening of ties with the connection to the United States. By pursuing that steady course, he was able to prevent any delay in the return of the occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty in April 1982. At the same time, Mubarak Mubārak tried to contain the disaffections that had surfaced in the last year of Sādāt’s era. He announced the end of the reign of the privileged minority that had dominated the invigorated private sector during the Sādāt years. He also moved immediately to soften the harsh edges of the authoritarianism of Free Officer rulereleased Sādāt’s political prisoners, while prosecuting vigorously the Islamic militants who had plotted the late president’s assassination. Unfortunately, Egypt’s worsening economic problems did not lend themselves to rapid improvementcould not be solved quickly. But in his very first speeches Mubarak Mubārak did frankly and perceptively outline the shortcomings of the Egyptian economyidentify Egypt’s economic shortcomings.

These solid beginnings were undercut by the Israeli invasion of when Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, only five weeks after the Jewish state’s final withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. In Egypt the invasion was perceived as an Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinian nationalism, and Mubarak Mubārak was accused by his detractors foes of allowing Israel to take advantage of exploit Egypt’s position of disengagement. Official relations with Israel were severely strained until the latter Israel initiated its partial withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985. As a result of Mubarak’s cautious policies, on the other hand, Egypt gradually was able However, Mubārak’s cautious policies did enable Egypt to repair its relationships with most of the moderate Arab nations.states. At an Arab League summit in 1987, each government was authorized to restore diplomatic relations with Egypt as it saw fit; Iraq—which had been a leading critic of Sādāt’s peace with Israel but by then was in a protracted war with Iran—took that opportunity to purchase military supplies from Egypt. Egypt resumed membership in the league two years later.

Within the country, opposition to a variety of political, economic, and social policies continued, chiefly among discontented labour and religious groups. The government contained labour strikes, food riots, and other incidents of unrest and adopted several measures aimed at curbing a determined drive by Islāmic fundamentalists Islamic extremists to destabilize the regime.

In the late 1980s Egypt’s economy suffered markedly from a sharp decline in falling oil prices in 1986 and was further weakened by a drop in the number of remittances from its three million workers abroad. In spite of a rising debt burdenof debt, the government continued to rely heavily on foreign economic aid.

General worksOverviews are provided by Richard F. Nyrop (ed.), Egypt: A Country Study, 4th ed. (1983), covering the history, society, economy, and politics; Shirley Kay, The Egyptians: How They Live and Work (1975), an introductory survey of

, leading to growing interference by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Egypt’s economic policies; in 1991 the Egyptian government signed the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program with the IMF and the World Bank. The country’s currency, the Egyptian pound, had to be devalued several times, interest rates were raised, and subsidies were lowered on food and fuel. These policies especially harmed the poorest Egyptians, who often looked to Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood for assistance. Some Muslim extremists, however, including Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, continued to resort to terrorism against political leaders, secularist writers, Copts, and even foreign tourists, the last-named being a major source of Egypt’s foreign exchange.

Politics in Egypt continued to follow authoritarian patterns, as Mubārak was reelected to the presidency without opposition in 1987, 1993, and 1999. His National Democratic Party continued to increase its majority of delegates in the People’s Assembly in the elections held every five years. The Muslim Brotherhood, unofficially allowed to revive under Sādāt but never authorized to become a political party, threw its popular support to the New Wafd in one election and to the Liberal Socialists in another. It was widely believed that voting results were rigged to ensure that Mubārak’s supporters would win.

Although Egypt’s press was freer than it had been under Nasser or Sādāt, Mubārak introduced a law in 1995 that would imprison journalists or party leaders who published news injurious to a government official. Popular pressure caused the Assembly to scale down the law, which was eventually voided by Egypt’s Constitutional Court. However, the growing censorship by the Islamic courts and the rector of al-Azhar University tempered freedom of speech and the press in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In its struggle against Islamist terrorism, Mubārak’s regime resorted to preventive detention and, allegedly, torture. Egyptian terrorists, for their part, assassinated several government ministers, nearly killed Mubārak himself in Addis Ababa, Eth., in 1995, and gunned down tourists near Egypt’s most famous monuments—including an especially violent attack at Luxor in 1997. A leading Islamist, Sheikh ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, escaped to the United States, where he took part in a 1993 truck bomb attack on New York City’s World Trade Center and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for that crime and for conspiracy to commit further attacks. Another Islamist leader, a Cairene pediatrician named Ayman al-Zahahiri, fled to Afghanistan, where he led members of Islamic Jihad in joining the transnational terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda. Despite government initiatives to control the problem, domestic terrorism remains a threat to Egypt’s stability.

Some social and economic problems either stemmed from or were exacerbated by Egypt’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) on the side of the U.S.-led coalition. Egyptian troops took part in the conflict, as did soldiers from many Arab countries. Although Egypt was rewarded for its participation by forgiveness of billions of dollars that it owed for the purchase of arms from the West, many Egyptian expatriate workers lost their jobs in Iraq because of that country’s invasion of Kuwait. Likewise, Egypt’s hopes that its contractors would win bids to help rebuild Kuwait after the war were disappointed, and a plan to station Egyptian and Syrian troops as peacekeepers in the region was rejected by the Persian Gulf states. Perhaps understandably, financially strapped Egyptians began to resent wealthy Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other gulf Arabs who often spent their vacations gambling in Cairo’s luxury hotels.

The Egyptian public also grew skeptical of ongoing efforts by successive U.S. presidents and by their own president to promote peace between Israel and other Arab countries and, particularly, the Palestinians. In a changing global economy, there was a popular suspicion that such attempts at fostering better relations might have some ulterior motive. In particular, many Egyptians feared a possible U.S. and Israeli attempt to manipulate Egypt’s industries, especially since computer and information technology—both of which Egypt depended heavily on the West to obtain and use—became more vital to economic growth. Since 2004, however, expansion of the country’s Internet connectivity has ranked particularly high on the economic agenda of Egypt’s prime minister, Ahmad Nazif, himself a computer engineer.

In fact, Mubārak’s commitment to domestic development was evident in his choice of three successive economic planners to serve as prime minister during the 1990s. And though Egypt was becoming ever more sophisticated economically, it was doing so at a high price. Its independence was being curtailed by interference from international lenders such as the IMF, and a growing disparity in income and access to resources was straining relations between its rich and poor citizens as well as contributing to the erosion of unity between its Muslims and Copts. While some Muslims accused the Copts of serving as agents for foreign powers and of controlling Egypt’s economy, some Copts accused Muslims of destroying churches and compelling Egyptian Christians to convert to Islam. Although both Muslim and Christian Egyptians have, for the most part, made an effort to minimize their differences publicly in order to maintain national unity, rapid and uneven development has ultimately posed a threat to Egypt’s political and cultural leadership of the Arab world.

General works

Overviews are provided in Egypt Almanac (2003), a commercial publication by Egypto-File that is articulate, accurate, and amply furnished with statistics and historical information; Jaromir Malek (ed.), Egypt: Ancient Culture, Modern Land (1993), surveying Egypt’s geography, history, government, and culture, as well as transportation; Jasper More, The Land of Egypt (1980), an illustrated general description of the country; Barbara Watterson, The Egyptians (1997), a well-written overview of Egypt from the Stone Age to modern times; T.G.H. James, Egypt: The Living Past (1992), which also stresses the continuity of ancient and modern Egypt, with colour photographs; Hisham Youssef, John Rodenbeck, and Hans Hoefer (eds.), Egypt, 4th ed. (1997), which includes clearly written descriptions and beautiful photographs as well as sound guidance for the traveler; and Ahmed Fakhry, The Oases of Egypt, 2 vol. (1973, reissued 1982), a description of the oases of the Western Desert.

Geography

The landW.B. Fisher, The Land

Colbert C. Held, Middle East Patterns: A PhysicalPlaces, SocialPeople, and Regional Geography, 7th rev. Politics, 4th ed. (19782005), gives basic geographical information; M.S. Abu al-ʿIzz, Landforms of Egypt, trans. from Arabic by Yusuf A. Fayid(1971; originally published in Arabic, 1966), provides a detailed outline of physiographic regionalization; and Martin A.J. Williams and Hugues Faure (eds.), The Sahara and the Nile: Quaternary Environments and Prehistoric Occupation in Northern Africa (1980), is a detailed geologic and anthropological study. Other specialized works include Rushdi Said(ed.), The Geology of Egypt (1962, reissued 1990), and The Geological Evolution of the River Nile (1981); as well as Tom Little, High Dam at Aswan: The Subjugation of the Nile (1965); and Julian RzóskaJulian Rzóska (ed.), The Nile: Biology of an Ancient River (1976), containing discussion of the biological effects of the Aswān High Dam. On plants and animals, see ; John Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley (1979); Jean Kérisel, The Nile and Its Masters: Past, Present, and Future: Source of Hope and Anger (2001), trans. by Philip Cockle; as well as Bonnie M. Sampsell, A Traveler’s Guide to the Geology of Egypt (2003). Among the works that discuss plants and animals are Vivi Täckholm, Gunnar Täckholm, and Mohammed Drar, Flora of Egypt, 4 vol. (1941–69, reprinted 1973), the standard work on the subject; Richard Meinertzhagen, Nicoll’s Birds of Egypt, 2 vol. (1930), a primary source, copiously illustrated; and John Anderson, William E. De Winton, and George A. Boulenger, Zoology of Egypt, 3 vol. in 4 (1898–1907, reprinted 1965), an authoritative and amply illustrated standard work.

People

Henry Habib-Ayrout, The Fellaheen, trans. by Hilary Wayment(1945, reprinted 1981; originally published in French, 1938), contains observations on the customs, dress, and psychology of the Egyptian peasant; and Hamid Ammar, Growing Up in an Egyptian Village (1954, reissued reprinted 1973), is an excellent and full account of village life in Egypt.

The people

Abbas M. Ammar, The People of Sharqiya, 2 vol. (1944), offers a physical anthropologist’s description of the inhabitants of the eastern Deltadelta; Robert A. Fernea, Nubians in Egypt: Peaceful People (1973), is an illustrated ethnographic essay; Joseph J. Hobbs, Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness (1989), focuses on an Arab tribe living in the Eastern Desert; and Anwar G. Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History (1969, reissued 1980), a discussion of discusses the background of classical Arabic and the dichotomy between it and the various dialects. William H. Worrell, A Short Account of the Copts (1945), is a concise study of the Extensive coverage of the indigenous Christian population of Egypt can be found in Aziz S. Atiya (ed.), The Coptic Encyclopedia, 8 vol. (1991). Other studies of religions of Egypt include Otto F.A. Meinardus, Christian Egypt, Ancient and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (1977), on the Christian communities; Morroe Berger, Islam in Egypt Today: Social and Political Aspects of Popular Religion (1970); and G.H. Jansen, Militant Islam (1979). For a popular introduction to the religions of Egypt, see Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict, new ed. (1992); and Denis J. Sullivan and Sana Abed-Kotob, Islam in Contemporary Egypt: Civil Society vs. the State (1999), on the Muslim majority. Veronica Ions, Egyptian Mythology, new rev. ed. (1983).

The economy

Robert L. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (1984); Robert Mabro, The Egyptian Economy, 1952–1972 (1974); Robert Mabro and Samir Radwan, The Industrialization of Egypt, 1939–1973: Policy and Performance (1976); Kasim Alrimawi (Qasim Rimawi), The Challenge of Industrialization, Egypt (19741982, reissued 1990), presents a popular introduction to the religion of Egypt.

Economy

Studies of aspects of the Egyptian economy include Galal A. Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament: A Study in the Interaction of External Pressure, Political Folly, and Social Tension in Egypt, 1960–1990 (1995), and Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?: Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present (2000); as well as Robert L. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (1984); Charles Issawi, Egypt in Revolution: An Economic Analysis (1963, reprinted 1986); Mostafa H. Nagi, Labor Force and Employment in Egypt: A Demographic and Socioeconomic Analysis (1971); Rashed al-Barawy, Economic Development in the United Arab Republic: Egypt (1972); K.M. Barbour, The Growth, Location, and Structure of Industry in Egypt (1972); Maurice Girgis, Industrialization and Trade Patterns in Egypt (1977); Yusuf J. Ahmad, Absorptive Capacity of the Egyptian Economy: An Examination of Problems and Prospects (1976); David William Carr, Foreign Investment and Development in Egypt (1979); Khalid Ikram, Egypt, Economic Management in a Period of Transition (1980); and David William Carr, Foreign Investment and Development in Egypt (1979); Khalid Ikram, Egypt, Economic Management in a Period of Transition (1980); Ibrahim M. Oweiss (ed.), The Political Economy of Contemporary Egypt (1990); Phebe Marr (ed.), Egypt at the Crossroads: Domestic Stability and Regional Role (1999); John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (1983).

Administrative and social conditions

Harold F. Alderfer, M. Fathalla El Khatib, and Moustafa Ahmed Fahmy, Local Government in the United Arab Republic (1963); Morroe Berger, Bureaucracy and Society in Modern Egypt (1957, reprinted 1969); and P.J. Vatikiotis, The Egyptian Army in Politics: Pattern for New Nations? (1961, reprinted 1975). See also Frank Tachau (ed.), Political Elites and Political Development in the Middle East (1975); Enid Hill, Mahkama!: Studies in the Egyptian Legal System: Courts & Crimes, Law & Society (1979; and Eberhard Kienle, A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (2001).

Government and society

Topics related to government and society are covered in Richard H. Adams, Jr., Development and Social Change in Rural Egypt (1986); Nazih N.M. Ayubi, Bureaucracy and Politics in Contemporary Egypt (1980); Ninette S. Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship (2002); Nathan J. Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (1997); James B. Mayfield, Local Institutions and Egyptian Rural Development (1974); and Helmi R. Tadros, Rural Resettlement in Egypt’s Reclaimed Lands (1978). On education, see Education is the subject of Amir Boktor, The Development and Expansion of Education in the United Arab Republic (1963), an important general survey; Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning (1961, reissued 1974); and Georgie D.M. Hyde, Education in Modern Egypt: Ideals and Realities (1978)Donald Malcolm Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (1990, reissued 2002); and Lee Wilcox, Arab Republic of Egypt (1988), which contains detailed information about Egypt’s educational institutions for American university registrars. Other works on social conditions include Tom Little, Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (19671995), a study of social and political structures; Peter Mansfield, Nasser’s Egypt, 2nd ed. (1969), a clear and orderly description of political, economic, and social changes in Egypt after 1952; Evelyn A. Early, Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing with an Egg and a Stone (1993); Azza M. Karam, Women, Islamisms, and the State: Contemporary Feminism in Egypt (1998); Unni Wikan, Life Among the Poor in Cairo, trans. by Ann Henning(1980; originally published in Norwegian, 1976); Abdel R. Omran (ed.), Egypt: Population Problems & Prospects (1973); Saad M. Gadalla, Land Reform in Relation to Social Development, Egypt (1962), and Is There Hope?: Fertility and Family Planning in a Rural Egyptian Community (1978); and Andrea B. Rugh, Family in Contemporary Egypt (1984).

Works dealing with arts and culture of Egypt include Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996), on popular culture; Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (2002); M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (1987), on the Egyptian theatre; Virginia Danielson, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song and Egyptian Music in the Twentieth Century (1997), on vocal music; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962, reissued 1983), a study of the interaction of Western and indigenous culture in its historical context; Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theatre Theater and Cinema (1958);Abd al-Monem Ismail, Drama and Society in Contemporary Egypt (1967); Farouk Abdel Wahab (comp.), Modern Egyptian Drama (1974); Abdel-Aziz Abdel-MeguidRoger Allen, The Modern Arabic Short Story: Its Emergence, Development, and Form (1950?); Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and Its Main Trends from 1913 to 1952 (1971); and Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (1995); Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Roger Allen (eds.), Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology (1995); Denys Johnson-Davies (trans.), Egyptian Short Stories (1978, reissued 1995); Hilary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism (1974). Other studies include Mouhan ; Mounah A. Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1882–1922 (1971); Yves Thoraval, Regards sur le cinéma Égyptien (1975), on the Egyptian cinema; and Mustafa Darwish, Dream Makers on the Nile: A Portrait of Egyptian Cinema (1998); Pierre Du Bourguet, Coptic Art(1971, originally published in French, 1968).

History

Ancient Egypt

The most detailed presentation of Egyptian history, with full bibliographies arranged by subject, is the multivolume Cambridge Ancient History, though volumes 1 and 2 no longer reflect current knowledge. Wolfgang Helck, Eberhard Otto, and Wolhart Westendorf (eds.), Lexikon der Ägyptologie (1975– ), is the basic reference work in Egyptology, of which 5 volumes had appeared by 1986, with further parts published in fascicles. Michael A. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization (1979, reissued 1984), is a comprehensive general work on prehistory; while Lech Krzyżaniak, Early Farming Cultures on the Lower Nile: The Predynastic Period in Egypt (1977), focuses on the transition to agriculture and on Lower Egypt. General studies include Cyril Aldred, The Egyptians, rev. ed. (1984); and John Ruffle, Heritage of the Pharaohs: An Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology (1977); as well as other works cited below under the specific periods on which they focus. General histories include B.G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History (1983), containing four essays on the main periods, concentrating on relations with Africa, and including valuable bibliographies; and Sir Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (1961), a personal history, notable for the use made of ancient Egyptian texts. William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (1971), is a reliable brief introduction; and Étienne Drioton and Jacques Vandier, L’Égypte: des origines à la conquête d’Alexandre, 4th ed. (1962, reprinted 1984), remains valuable for its critical discussions. John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture (1951, reprinted 1965), is a selective historical study. William C. Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt, 2 vol. (1953–59), is a detailed cultural history of Egypt to the end of the 20th dynasty, based on the collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Wolfgang Helck, Geschichte des alten Ägypten (1968, reprinted 1981), is still the best general history; his Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr., 2nd ed. (1971), is the fundamental work on foreign relations, and his Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Alten Ägypten im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend vor Chr. (1975), covers institutions and economics. Rolf Krauss, Sothis- und Monddaten: Studien zur astronomischen und technischen Chronologie Altägyptens (1985), is a vital chronological study for the 2nd and 1st millennia BC; its dates are adopted in this article with minor variations. John Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (1980), is a concise, geographically oriented survey. Hermann Kees, Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography (1961, reprinted 1977; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1958; 3rd German ed., 1977), studies a number of major sites in depth. Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology (1976), is a useful discussion of geographic and environmental conditions and their relation to the development of ancient Egyptian civilization. Claude Vandersleyen et al., Das alte Ägypten (1975), is the most comprehensive survey of Egyptian art. W. Stevenson Smith, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, rev. ed., edited by William Kelly Simpson (1981), is an excellent general account; and for the Old Kingdom, Smith’s History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom, 2nd ed. (1949), is still a fundamental source. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, 3 vol. (1973–80), offers an excellent collection of texts in translation, covering the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms and the Late Period. A smaller selection of readings is available in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry, new ed. (1973); while James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (1969), contains a wide selection of Egyptian material in translation. Studies of administration include Klaus Baer, Rank and Title in the Old Kingdom (1960, reprinted 1974); to which Nigel Strudwick, The Administration of Egypt in the Old Kingdom: The Highest Titles and Their Holders (1985), adds a vast amount of detail. Wolfgang Helck, Zur Verwaltung des Mittleren und Neuen Reichs (1958), with a separately published index volume (1975), is the basic work on the succeeding periods.

Egypt from the 18th dynasty to 332 BC

The rise of the New Kingdom is treated in Jürgen Von Beckerath, Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der Zweiten Zwischenzeit in Ägypten (1964). Donald B. Redford, History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt: Seven Studies (1967), includes a reevaluation of Hatshepsut. An informative account of the New Kingdom empire at its height is Elizabeth Riefstahl, Thebes in the Time of Amunhotep III (1964, reprinted 1971). For the controversial Amarna period, Rolf Krauss, Das Ende der Amarnazeit: Beitr. zur Geschichte u. Chronologie d. Neuen Reiches (1978); and Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten, the Heretic King (1984), offer strongly contrasting interpretations. Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten and Nefertiti (1973), is a good collection of the artistic evidence for the period. For the Ramesside period, K.A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II King of Egypt (1982), sets its subject in context, presenting the New Kingdom in general as well as Ramses’ own reign. Edward F. Wente, Late Ramesside Letters (1967), deals with material from the end of the same period. For the economy of this time, see the major work of J.J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period: An Economic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (1975). John Romer, Ancient Lives: Daily Life in Egypt of the Pharaohs (1984), presents the life of the same community. T.G.H. James, Pharaoh’s People: Scenes from Life in Imperial Egypt (1984), is concerned with lifestyles of higher ranks of society in the same general period. K.A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 B.C.), 2nd rev. ed. (1986), is the basic work on the period. Hermann Kees, Das Priestertum im ägyptischen Staat, vom neuen Reich bis zur Spätzeit (1953), with an index volume, Indices und Nachträge (1958), is a comprehensive analysis of the Egyptian priesthoods. This fundamental institution of the Late Period is also valuably treated in Serge Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt (1960, reprinted 1980; originally published in French, 1957). On the period from the Saite 26th dynasty until Alexander the Great, see Friedrich K. Kienitz, Die politische Geschichte Ägyptens vom 7. bis 4. Jahrhundert vor der Zeitwende (1953), based on both Egyptian and classical sources. Alan B. Lloyd, Herodotus, Book II, 2 vol. (1975–76), contains much material on the Late Period.

Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

On the period in general, see Harold I. Bell, Egypt, from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest: A Study in the Diffusion and Decay of Hellenism (1948, reprinted 1980); and Alan K. Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 332 B.C.–A.D. 642: From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (1986). The basic general works on the papyri are L. Mitteis and U. Wilcken, Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, 2 vol. in 4 (1912, reprinted 1963); and E.G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (1968, reissued 1980), with its illustrated companion, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (1971). On Ptolemaic Egypt, see Dorothy J. Crawford, Kerkeosiris: An Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic Period (1971); P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vol. (1972); J. Grafton Milne, A History of Egypt Under Roman Rule, 3rd rev. ed. (1924); Orsolina Montevecchi, La papirologia (1973); Alan E. Samuel, From Athens to Alexandria: Hellenism and Social Goals in Ptolemaic Egypt (1983); Naphtali Lewis, Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt: Case Studies in the Social History of the Hellenistic World (1986); E.E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (1983); M. Rostovtzeff, The Social & Economic History of the Hellenistic World, 3 vol. (1941, reprinted with corrections 1972); and Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra (1984). On Roman Egypt, see A.C. Johnson, Roman Egypt to the Reign of Diocletian, vol. 2 in Tenney Frank (ed.), An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, 6 vol. (1933–40, reprinted 1975); A.H.M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 2nd ed. (1971, reprinted 1983); and Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (1983). On Byzantine Egypt, see Alfred J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, 2nd ed., revised by P.M. Fraser (1978); Edward Rochie Hardy, The Large Estates of Byzantine Egypt (1931, reprinted 1968), and Christian Egypt: Church and People: Christianity and Nationalism in the Patriarchate of Alexandria (1952); Allan Chester Johnson and Louis C. West, Byzantine Egypt: Economic Studies (1949, reprinted 1967); and Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society, and Belief in Early Christian Egypt (1979).

Egypt

, trans. by Caryll Hay-Shaw (also published as Art of the Copts, 1971; originally published in French, 1968); Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art, 1910–2003, new rev. ed. (2005), on the visual arts; W. Forman and B. Forman and Ramses Wissa-Wassef, Tapestries from Egypt Woven by the Children of Harrania, trans. from the Czech by Jean Layton (1961); and Sherifa Zuhur (ed.), Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East (1998).

History

Good general histories include Harry Adès, A Traveller’s History of Egypt (2007); and Glenn E. Perry, The History of Egypt (2004).

Egypt from c.630 to c.1800

Two standard works that survey medieval Egyptian history as a whole are Stanley Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (1968); and Gaston Wiet, L’Égypte arabe de la conquête arabe à la conquête ottomane, 642–1517 de l’ère chrétienne, vol. 4 in Gabriel Hanotaux, Histoire de la nation égyptienne, 7 vol. (1931–40). Each of these is outdated in many respects, but each presents an accurate summary of the political history of the period, based on primary Arabic sources; also, both are strong on Egyptian architecture as an insight into political, social, and economic history. A valuable later reference source with comprehensive coverage of the period is Joan Wucher King, Historical Dictionary of Egypt (1984). For the economic history, see Subhi Labib, Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens im Spätmittelalter, 1171–1517 (1965); Labib has summarized this book in English in the form of an articleAt the cutting edge of the study of Egypt’s history since Islam is Carl F. Petry and M.W. Daly (eds.), Cambridge History of Egypt, 2 vol. (1998). Economic history is detailed in Subhi Labib, “Egyptian Commercial Policy in the Middle Ages,” in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East: From the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, edited by M.A. Cook, pp. 63–77 (1970). Eliyahu , which is a summary of Labib’s more detailed work, Handelsgeschichte Ägyptens im Spätmittelalter, 1171–1517 (1965). E. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (1976), and Levant Trade in the Later Middle Ages (1983), are also important. Aziz S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity (1968, reissued 1980), is authoritative for Coptic history. For the The beginnings of Muslim Egypt , see are covered in Francesco Gabrieli, Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, trans. by Virginia Luling and Rosamund Linell(1968, reissued 2002; originally published in Italian, 1967), for the conquest of Egypt; and Daniel C. Clement Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (1950), for Muslim tax policy in Egypt. For the Ṭūlūnids, see Zaky Mohamed . The Ṭūlūnids are the subject of Zaki Muhammad Hasan, Les Tulunides, études de l’Égypte musulmane à la fin du IXe siècle, 868–905(1933). Fāṭimid studies have been transformed by S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1968– ), of which four volumes had appeared by 19871967–88, reissued 1999). Three articles by Hamilton A.R. Gibbthat are definitive for Egypt under the Ayyūbids and during the Crusades , all published in appear in Kenneth M. Setton (ed.), A History of the Crusades, ed. by Kenneth M. Setton, 2nd ed., 5 6 vol. (1958–851969–89): “The Caliphate and the Arab States,” 1:81–98; “The Rise of Saladin, 1169–1189,” 1:563–589; and “The Aiyūbids,” 2:693–714. See also R. Stephen Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193–1260 (1977). For Mamlūk and Ottoman Egypt , see are considered in F.R.C. Bagley (ed. and trans.), The Last Great Muslim Empires, vol. 3 in (1969, reissued 1996), part 3 of The Muslim World: A Historical Survey, 3 vol. (1960–69, ; originally published in German, 1952–59). Mamlūk political organization is explained in Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981). An account of the early Mamlūk state is found in Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1382 (1986); and for the Ottoman period alone , see Stanford J. Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1798 (1962).

General references include Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr.,, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt (1999); and Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr. and Robert Johnston, Historical Dictionary of Egypt, 3rd ed. (2003). Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 2 vol5th ed. (18361860, reissued in 1 vol., 19732003), is a classic study of everyday life during the second quarter of the 19th century. An analysis of Ties between economic and religious forces in early modern Egypt are described in Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (1979, reissued 1998). Analyses of the political developments of the period is are offered in F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (1984, reissued 1999); Ehud R. Jamal M. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (1990); Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (1984); Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (1997, reissued 2002); and Juan R.I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Úrabi Movement (1993). Jamal Mohammed Ahmed, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism (1960, reissued 1968), is particularly concerned with the secular nationalists of the period from 1892 to 1914. Other useful works are Gabriel Baer, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt, 1800–1950 (1962); P.M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516–1922 (1966), and ; P.M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (1968); Jacob M. Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt (1953, reissued reprinted 1979); Helen Anne B. Rivlin, The Agricultural Policy of Muḥammad ʿAlī in Egypt (1961); Afaf Lufti Al-sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (1984), a sturdy defense by an Egyptian author; Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (1966); Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (2004); and Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952 (1961, reprinted reissued 1981). A good survey of Egypt between the 1919 and 1952 revolutions is Selma Botman, Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919–1952 (1991); a collection of recent studies is Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (eds.), Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952 (2005). P.J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (1978), offers a fine biography, especially for the years between 1930 and 1952; Raymond W. Nasser’s revolution is the subject of Joel Gordon, Egypt’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (1992); Kirk J. Beattie, Egypt During the Nasser Years: Ideology, Politics, and Civil Society (1994), examines the dynamics of the Nasser regime; and Raymond William Baker, Egypt’s Uncertain Revolution Under Nasser and Sadat (1978), analyzes the effect and Sadat and After: Struggles for Egypt’s Political Soul (1990), analyze the effects of the Egyptian revolution on Egyptian society; David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (1981), is an early assessment of the Sādāt years; . Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Jr., Egyptian Politics Under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of an Authoritarian-Modernizing State, updated ed. (19851988), is also an interesting study; important study. It may be followed with Nazih N. Ayubi, The State and Public Policies in Egypt Since Sadat (1991); Kirk J. Beattie, Egypt During the Sadat Years (2000); and Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order (1989). Derek Hopwood, Egypt. , Politics, and Society, 1945–19841945–1990, 2nd 3rd ed. (19851991), is a general comprehensive introduction; and . P.J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt, 3rd : From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, 4th ed. (19851991), together with ; Afaf Lufti Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, A Short History of Modern Egypt, new ed. (19851996), are especially valuable for their analyses of the post-Sādāt period.; and Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation State, 2nd ed. (2004), provide modern history surveys.